Derailed? Ethan Hawke and Greta Gerwig.
Maggie’s Plan bears in its DNA more than a little Midsummer Night’s Dream, a text quoted explicitly in the film’s topsy-turvy love matches and a late scrambling to restore amends. That scramble is just one of Maggie’s plans; she has a few, in fact, and to say too much about any of them would spoil the zigs and zags of this lightly screwball comedy, which runs sweeter and deeper than the genre usually allows. (Stay away from the trailer if you can — it spoils her endgame.)
A thirtysomething graduate school adviser at the New School, the sensible, spirited Maggie (Greta Gerwig) reveals her initial plan to her best friend (Bill Hader) in the film’s opening minutes: She intends to have a baby. But Maggie’s plan gets derailed when chance — or is it fate? — puts her in the path of a professor in the ficto-critical anthropology department (whatever that is) named John (Ethan Hawke, born to play an academic), who looks to her for advice when his marriage to a fellow anthropologist, the withering Georgette (Julianne Moore, having a blast with a Germanic accent), hits a rough patch.
Writer-director Rebecca Miller has a terrific sense of humor about her chosen milieus, from the small-batch, craft scene to egghead academics. The plot’s flyaway antics are smoothed down by characters that are specific, and Miller delicately shades in their wants, longstanding aches and careful plans destined to go awry. She has such compassion for these characters.
Maggie’s Plan is an ensemble piece, with Maya Rudolph, Travis Fimmel and a magic, romantic New York rounding out the cast. They’re all great, but it’s Gerwig who’s just so damn gosh-wow. A natural comedienne, she stretches her limbs here to play, after so many flibbertigibbets, a character with her feet solidly on the ground. That doesn’t mean her Maggie doesn’t make some seriously boneheaded moves. She’s only human — and what fools these mortals be.
