Monthly Archives: July 2016

  • Maggie’s Plan

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rebecca Miller (2015)

    In fact, Maggie Hardin (Greta Gerwig) has two plans.   At the start of the film, she’s decided to become a mother and to inseminate herself with the help of a man she knew in college, Guy Childers (Travis Fimmel).  (The name looks symbolic once you see it in writing.)  Maggie – a thirtyish New Yorker who lives alone and works in higher education (in a non-academic job) – doesn’t intend her baby to have a father other than a biological one:  she’ll get a man in her life when the right one comes along.   That seems, to Maggie, to have happened, when she falls in love with an anthropologist called John Harding (Ethan Hawke).   (He and Maggie need similar surnames so that the college administration can mix up their pay cheques – and John and Maggie thereby get into their first conversation.)  John, married with two children, is an adjunct professor but lives in the academic shadow of his formidable Danish wife Georgette (Julianne Moore), who holds a chair at Columbia.   To try and shift the balance of power, he’s been writing – for years – a magnum opus novel.  Maggie has a baby girl and sets up home with John; when she discovers he’s an immature, self-centred prick, she develops a second plan – to return him to Georgette.  The geographical and cultural setting, the competition between sexual and intellectual egos, the wry, vaguely humorous music on the soundtrack – all these things evoke the world of vintage Woody Allen; and the writer-director Rebecca Miller has written plenty of witty lines for her high-powered cast to deliver.  Maggie’s Plan doesn’t have much momentum, though, in terms of either its comic plot or its characters’ collisions.  There are also problems around the casting and playing of the two main roles.

    Miller’s script indicates repeatedly that Maggie is organised to the point of control freakery.  If not a wholly new departure for Greta Gerwig, this kind of personality sounds like a change from the roles she played in Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha and Mistress America.   Maggie’s initiatory side calls rather to mind Violet, the fragrant ringleader Gerwig played in Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress.  Her largely stylised performance in that film allowed Gerwig to conceal Violet’s vulnerability – behind dialogue that was far from naturalistic and delivered at comically high speed – until Stillman wanted it to emerge.  Greta Gerwig has usually registered, however, playing young women whose emotional eloquence is greater than their verbal articulacy, whose lives are messy rather than overly ordered.  In Maggie’s Plan, there isn’t a sufficient traction between the character as written and the qualities that the actress playing her naturally brings to bear:  Gerwig expresses Maggie’s increasingly sad and confused feelings effortlessly and poignantly.  In the film’s last scene, when Maggie tells her friends Felicia (Maya Rudolph) and Tony (Bill Hader), ‘I’ve decided to  embrace the mystery of the universe and stop bossing everyone around so much’, this couple’s young son Max (Monte Green) chips in:  ‘Good luck with that, bossy pants’.   This didn’t make sense to me and sums up the problem of having Gerwig in the role of Maggie.  She’s humorous, sensitive and likeable:  you don’t want her to be taught a lesson in how to live.

    Ethan Hawke is a worse problem because John Harding, ‘one of the bad boys of ficto-critical anthropology[1]’, is so far from likeable.  It’s no surprise that an anthropologist in a movie like Maggie’s Plan is made into a human animal case study but this turns out to be less enjoyable in practice than it promises to be on paper.  Ethan Hawke looks to be having fun with the role but John is tolerable only when he’s on the receiving end of the imperious intellectual self-confidence of Georgette and the readier wit of his kids (well played by Mina Sundwall and Jackson Frazer).   Hawke’s John is utterly charmless in his dealings with Maggie:  it’s hard to believe that he sweeps her off her feet – or in their love affair as more than a necessary plot device.  The supporting performances are more effective.   Julianne Moore is very amusing as Georgette, who undoubtedly is a control freak – in her domestic and her academic lives – and whose self-possession is lost more obviously than Maggie’s (though only temporarily).  A heated exchange between the two women, when Maggie first raises the idea of John’s returning to Georgette, is the most dynamic bit in the film.  Her name is hardly a clue to the kind of material Georgette is made of but the costume designer, Malgosia Turzanska, has come up with some excellent contrasting knitwear for Gerwig and Moore.  As Felicia and Tony, Maya Rudolph and Bill Hader are an agreeably astringent double act.  All the children are good, including Ida Rohatyn (whose father Michael wrote the film’s score) as Maggie’s daughter, Lily.

    When Maggie first tells him she’s going to be artificially inseminated by Guy, Tony derides the latter as ‘a pickle salesman’, though Maggie insists he’s a ‘pickle entrepreneur’.   Whichever he is, Guy eventually returns Rebecca Miller’s movie, in spite of its surface sophistication and acrid undertow, to more traditional romcom territory.  Guy appears in only a few scenes but it’s clear from the start that he and Maggie like each other – and clear to the viewer that they’re made for each other.  Guy isn’t a fully written character but Travis Fimmel makes an impression that persists throughout and the few details about who Guy is are ones that you know will count for something.  As well as purveying pickles, he was a maths major and goes skating every Sunday.   The final scene takes place at an ice rink in Central Park.  We and the other characters in the story have been led to assume that Lily was fathered by John:  when Tony remarks that the little girl, now three years old, has an amazing grasp of numbers for her age, it’s confirmation that, contrary to what Maggie told Guy, his sperm came in useful after all.  In the film’s closing shot, Maggie sees Guy approaching the ice, and she keeps looking at him:  she may be wondering why she made things so complicated.  His final reappearance is a relief but it made me wonder the same about Rebecca Miller.

    12 July 2016

    [1] According to Wikipedia, there really is such a field of study:  Professor Michael Taussig at Columbia University is named as one of its prominent practitioners.

  • When We Were Kings

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Leon Gast (1996)

    The opening titles for this Oscar-winning documentary include the names of those who will appear as talking heads in what follows.  Introducing the main players like this would of course be conventional in a ‘fictional’ feature but it seems unusual for a documentary; you can therefore see the titles as an expression of confidence on the part of the director, Leon Gast, that he has a dramatically compelling tale to tell, and he has.  This is the story of the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ of October 1974 – in Kinshasa, capital of what was then Zaire – in which Muhammad Ali defeated George Foreman to regain the world heavyweight championship.   Needless to say, Ali is the star:  his name appears on screen before that of the film.  He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in the mid-1980s and the state of his health when When We Were Kings was made reinforces the nostalgic quality of Gast’s interviews with, among others, Norman Mailer, George Plimpton and Spike Lee.  The last-named doesn’t say much of interest but the retrospective contributions of Mailer and Plimpton, both of whom covered the fight and were ringside for it, are richly layered.  They are remembering arguably the most famous boxing match, arguably the greatest heavyweight fighter, and unarguably the most powerful sporting personality – as a performer on camera – of all time (ie so far).  By the time they were interviewed, the verbal aspect of that personality had been irretrievably submerged.  (At one point, an unidentified voiceover explains that Ali’s ill health consists of motor skills problems but that it has not resulted in any intellectual deficits.)

    The fact that Ali is no longer able to speak for himself resonates in the film in two ways.  It was more than seven years after the Foreman fight that he eventually retired from the ring:  you naturally wonder what-might-have-been, whether, if he’d quit after the Rumble (he was thirty-two at the time), Ali would not only have ended his career in extraordinary triumph but also avoided Parkinson’s in the years that followed.  (The fight he lost badly to Larry Holmes in October 1980 is widely considered to have caused physical damage that contributed to Ali’s later health problems.)  And because Parkinson’s has since silenced him, Ali’s motormouth has a  poignancy in When We Were Kings – although I had to keep reminding myself of this in order not to be annoyed or angered by much of what he says.  Forty-odd years on, I find it hard to forget his interview on Parkinson in 1971 – an occasion memorable not only for the separatist-cum-racist views that Ali expressed but also as a rare instance of the host’s standing up to egregious comments from a big-name guest.  (It’s only typing this that I’ve realised the unfortunate Parkinson’s/Parkinson connection …)

    Leon Gast makes clear the significance of the fight in Kinshasa as a return, for the two antagonists, to the continent which their forefathers had left as slaves.  In the opening sequences, Gast cross-cuts between interviews with the young Cassius Clay and newsreel of contemporary developments in the Belgian Congo (which became Zaire), on the cusp of the post-colonial era. The meaning of the contest to Ali especially – and what he meant to Africans at the time – is a strong theme throughout.  The Rumble, originally scheduled for September 1974 but postponed for several weeks when Foreman suffered a freak injury in training, was used by the promoter Don King as an opportunity to stage in Kinshasa, shortly before the fight itself, shows by stellar African-American musicians of the day, including James Brown and B B King.  In spite of all this, the film would hardly have gained and maintained the reputation it still has if the hot favourite Foreman had won:  it’s the unexpected outcome of a sporting event, rather than the substantial cultural contexts in which it took place, that makes the climax to When We Were Kings exciting.

    The footage of the time that describes the build-up to the fight depends heavily on Ali’s charisma.  In the ethnic circumstances, it was tough on George Foreman that he was darker-skinned than Ali yet, in the public perception of the contest, the villain of the piece; tough too that, in the fight itself, he was not just outwitted by his opponent’s tactics but verbally taunted by the supposedly heroic Ali.   Unfortunately, though, there’s no denying that, if you’re not a connoisseur of boxing, Foreman is a dull fellow – except for a moment of comically inadvertent casuistry.  In answer to a question at a press conference, he takes issue with the suggestion that postponing the fight will mean a delay:  the fight is being rescheduled and it will then take place, he insists, at the scheduled time.  This is quite an example of how big fight contestants, before the event, always have to be invincible.

    Next to Ali, Don King is the most colourful performer among the dramatis personae in the 1974 material.  He rattles off the ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity’ lines from As You Like It in an interview with George Plimpton, according to whom this was the tip of the Shakespeare-quoting iceberg in King’s head.  (I hadn’t realised the Kings/King link either …)  One of the most enjoyable aspects of When We Were Kings for me was the virtual double act of Plimpton and Norman Mailer.  Their forms of wit complement each other so well – Mailer flamboyant and demonstrative, Plimpton quietly incisive – and much of what they have to say is well worth listening to.  (Mailer is convinced that Ali’s fast talk in the build-up to the fight with Foreman was even faster than usual because he was scared of what would happen.  He also talks interestingly about Mobutu’s Zaire and the dictator’s personality.  Plimpton confesses to being much impressed by a local féticheur’s pronouncement that a succubus would stymie Foreman’s chances.)   But, for a viewer of the film in 2014, the two men don’t simply contribute recollections with a strong nostalgic edge.  Mailer died in 2007 and Plimpton three years later.  They themselves now generate feelings of regret – and pleasure that they’ve been recorded on film.

    13 September 2014

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