A quirky romantic comedy, Maggie’s Plan concerns a vibrant and practical thirty-something year old professional, totally comfortable in her own skin.
Maggie Hardin (Greta Gerwig) is at a crossroads. She is charming and optimistic, with success in her career in education and wonderful friends, but something is missing. Her sensible nature has led her to decide that without a great love in her life, she is going to have a child on her own, courtesy of a sperm donor. She has even picked out the father of her child, Guy (Travis Fimmel). He is, for all intents and purposes, a glorified pickle salesman – I kid you not. While, not surprisingly, he would prefer to go about this the traditional way, Maggie isn’t keen. Then, unexpectedly, she meets a college professor, anthropologist and struggling novelist, John (Ethan Hawke), who is in a strained marriage with Georgette (Julianne Moore), a brilliant, self-absorbed Danish academic .
The more they get to know one another, the more Maggie and John are smitten and before you know it, John has left Georgette and moved in with Maggie … and then they have a baby on the way.
But Maggie’s Plan was never going to be a conventional “and they lived happily ever after” kind of screenplay. With Maggie’s opinionated and married best friends Tony (Bill Hader) and Felicia (Maya Rudolph) observing wryly from the sidelines, Maggie sets in motion a new plan that catapults her into a nervy love triangle. This mixes heart and humour. It is a story about the variability of relationships over time.
Gerwig, not surprisingly, was attracted to the script and its sexy and modern defiance of romantic convention. “It’s about all these people falling in love, and falling out of love, and finding each other again, and nothing is perfect or clichéd. I’ve … never read anything like that before,” she says. As the film progresses, Maggie’s methods may be questionable, but it is her complexities and flaws that make her a fascinating and refreshing character for audiences to journey with. “Maggie would like to lead an ethical true life, but she’s also a realist, and there’s something intoxicating about her ability to move through the world without feeling like she must do this out of guilt. She feels like a very distinct spirit,” Gerwig says.
Writer/director Rebecca Miller agrees. “Maggie is driven by the need to be truthful; she’s driven by ethics, which leads her to make messes! This story is motivated by a desire not to be wasteful, a desire to do the right thing.” Miller, who has four previous feature films to her name (Angela, Personal Velocity: Three Portraits, The Ballad of Jack and Rose and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee), is accustomed to writing original screenplays or those based upon her own books. This time she sought a story to further develop and she found that in an unfinished novel by her good friend, author Karen Rinaldi.
The result is rich and rewarding, a thoroughly enjoyable offbeat film that introduces foible-riddled characters trying to do the best they can with the lives they lead. I freely admit that anytime I see Greta Gerwig billed in a movie I cringe at the prospect of entering the cinema and so it was here. There is just something about her characterisations that drives me absolutely batty. Not to put too a fine a point on it, I feel like screaming. So, imagine my surprise when I actually warmed to her in this offering. She was excellent playing the charming controller or wannabe controller.
Julianne Moore is stretched here into unfamiliar territory, adopting a decidedly foreign accent as the brainiac who has lost touch with her husband. Different though it was, in this context her character works. And the guys … the meat in the sandwich, Tony – Maggie’s best friend played by Bill Hader and the pickle baron with the heart of gold played by Travis Fimmel, made Maggie’s Plan even more edifying. It is a delight from start to finish, combining wit with wisdom and earthy interchanges between the players.
The take away is that no matter how much control you think you have, you haven’t! Rated M, Maggie’s Plan, featuring Greta Gerwig’s best performance to date, scores a 7½ out of 10.
Director: Rebecca Miller
Cast: Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore
Release Date: 7 July 2016
Rating: M – Coarse Language
Alex First
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television