Aubrey Malone
Maggie’s Plan (15A)
The parameters of the romance genre have changed, changed utterly. It’s got very scientific now. When love-hungry New Yorker Maggie (Greta Gerwig) fears she’s not going to meet Mr Right but still wants a baby she recruits a donor to make her pregnant. She then begins a relationship with anthropology professor-cum-struggling novelist John (Ethan Hawke).
John is married to Georgette (Julianne Moore), a foreign academic. She has the reputation of being a virago. Maggie sees John isn’t happy with her so she doesn’t feel guilty about taking him from her.
But after a few years, despite having a child together, the relationship between Maggie and John starts to falter. Maggie feels he still carries a torch for Georgette. She forms a plan – hence the film’s title – to get him back with her.
After Mistress America, a recent Greta Gerwig film that enthralled me, I was expecting great things from this. Unfortunately, it didn’t work for me at all. It tries too hard to impress and that always wars against spontaneity. I felt it couldn’t make up its mind if it wanted to be a comedy or a drama (I believe the current – awful – term for this melange is ‘dramedy’). As a result it ends up as neither.
The plot is wafer-thin. The jokes fall on stony ground. The dialogue is pretentious. People in real life don’t speak like university tomes – or fall in love because they can use big words together. Also, the film’s pace is too slow. And a frenetic pace, in my view, is what made Mistress America so good.
It’s obvious what director Rebecca Miller is up to. She’s trying to ape Woody Allen at every turn. Though Woody is still making films at 80+ and says he plans to die with his boots on, clearly a successor to him is needed if we’re to have a new generation of navel-gazing pseudo-intellectuals going through neurosis-laden crises in the groves of academe.
Evidence
So far, Noah Baumbach has been that person (he made Mistress America and another Allen-style movie, While We’re Young). Some people think Baumbach is a second-rate Allen. On the evidence of Maggie’s Plan, Miller is a second-rate Baumbach.
The cast also disappoints. Moore relies too much on her accent for her performance. Gerwig is in danger of becoming typecast with her kooky kindliness. And Hawke, who tries to reprise the cerebral chemistry he deployed to such effect in the films he made with Julie Delpy some years back, is betrayed by a script nowhere near the quality of these.
The result is a film that, for me at least, was as flat as a pancake. The ‘surprise’ ending of the last frame I saw coming a mile off. I’m sure you will too. Ms Miller would need to pull up her socks if she wants to be the new Woody Allen rather than a contrived pretender to his angst-ridden throne.
Fair **