Maggie’s Plan Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore. Directed by Rebecca Miller. Rated R. Opens Friday in select theaters.
The title character of Maggie’s Plan starts out as a familiar Greta Gerwig type: an intense but also flighty young woman engaged in intellectual pursuits (she’s a sort of career facilitator in the fine arts graduate program at a New York City college) and trying to figure out her love life. Then, half an hour in, the movie fast-forwards three years, and Maggie goes from neurotic infatuation with her married co-worker John (Ethan Hawke) to a life as John’s second wife and the mother of their young daughter. It’s a jarring shift in a movie that never quite figures out a proper tone or narrative approach, mixing aggressively whimsical comedy with angsty relationship drama.
The worst of the comedy comes from Julianne Moore giving a rare bad performance as John’s ex-wife Georgette, a chilly academic with a horribly unconvincing Danish accent and a speech impediment that makes her sound like Peter Cook in The Princess Bride talking about “twue wuv.” Writer-director Rebecca Miller is known for more serious dramas like Personal Velocity and The Ballad of Jack and Rose, and her attempts at comedy fall flat, especially her weak jabs at the academic world.
The love triangle among Maggie, John and Georgette has no sympathetic participants, although Maggie is more hapless than unlikable. Gerwig is good at making this kind of naïve, blithely overconfident character appealing, and even as Maggie makes one ill-advised decision after another, she’s still relatively charming. But it’s hard to see why she’s drawn to the inconsiderate, egotistical John or the judgmental Georgette, and Miller fails to give the relationships any convincing depth. The movie’s arch, literate tone aims to emulate Woody Allen or frequent Gerwig collaborator Noah Baumbach, but the jokes aren’t clever or incisive enough to get to that level. The plot grows more strained and contrived as the movie goes on, until it ends by hinting at a painfully predictable twist that would basically undermine all the preceding drama. Even the movie itself treats the entire affair as a waste of time.
