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.