‘Maggie’s Plan’ Review: Finding a Father

By

Joe Morgenstern

Joe Morgenstern
The Wall Street Journal
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May 19, 2016 2:08 p.m. ET

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Rebecca Miller wrote and directed “Maggie’s Plan,” a light-as-air romantic roundelay in which Maggie, played with droll gravity by Greta Gerwig, reveals her plan right off the bat.

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“I want a baby,” she tells a friend, then explains that she plans to get one through artificial insemination, since she doesn’t feel mature enough to sustain a marriage. That’s one key moment, obviously. Another comes a few years later, in a kind of pastel-colored mommy paradise—a toy-strewn, bubble-filled bathtub in which Maggie sits blowing still more bubbles with her very own little girl, Lily (Ida Rohatyn). “I want to live inside a bubble,” Maggie says, even though she has spent much of her life inside a bubble of illusory control. “Me too,” Lily replies. “But I want my own bubbles.” How Lily came to be is one part of an intricate story in which Maggie discovers that the best laid plans can work out nicely, but not at all as expected.

From the start of her directorial career two decades ago it was clear that Ms. Miller, the daughter of the playwright Arthur Miller, was a filmmaker of serious purpose and formidable intelligence. Who knew that she could do so delectable a comedy as this one—which grew out of a story by Karen Rinaldi—with unerring style, impeccable pacing and a blithe appreciation for the screwiness of modern life? The early passages of “Maggie’s Plan” hint at an incursion into Woody Allen territory, what with hyperverbal New Yorkers rattling on about their deeply held feelings of the moment. But Ms. Miller proves to be an original, setting her comic characters in motion like mini-planets that spin in eccentric but overlapping orbits.

Greta Gerwig and Ethan Hawke in ‘Maggie’s Plan’ Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

The first of the men in Maggie’s orbit is Guy ( Travis Fimmel), the sole proprietor of an artisanal pickle company called Brooklyn Brine; he’s her designated donor of what he calls his genetic goldmine. But then she meets Ethan Hawke’s John, a seductively confused ficto-anthropologist, whatever that is, who is married, not happily, to a Danish academic, Georgette; she is played to dazzling perfection by Julianne Moore, whose portrayal suggests a sort of Danish Dietrich. Soon Maggie’s original plan morphs into a new one involving John, followed by a bolder if not grander plan for John and Georgette. The flawlessly funny cast includes Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph. Plan to see them all posthaste.

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‘Personal Velocity’ (2002)

Rebecca Miller’s second feature has four stars, one of them unseen. The three on the screen are Parker Posey, Kyra Sedgwick and Fairuza Balk, each playing a woman who’s trying to break free of desperate circumstances; these richly textured portraits feel like life caught on the fly. The fourth star is the cinematographer, Ellen Kuras, who used digital technology, relatively new at the time, to give this fine film the look of edgy, hurtling urgency that it deserves.

Write to Joe Morgenstern at [email protected]