A romantic comedy worthy of the name isn’t what I expected of Rebecca Miller, whose previous pictures have been strained and unrelaxed exercises, often based on her novels. But Maggie’s Plan is terrifically funny and enjoyable – a metropolitan comedy in the former high style of Woody Allen, directed with elegance and dash by Miller and co-scripted by her with publisher-turned-screenwriter Karen Rinaldi. Greta Gerwig stars in her idiot savant Annie Hall mode as Maggie, a New York art dealer who is trying to become a single mom using sperm donated by an old school contemporary who is now making a fortune marketing pickles. Her plan is to get pregnant within four months, but then she has an encounter with handsome, distrait John (Ethan Hawke), a lecturer in “ficto-critical anthropology”, who is unhappily married to scary intellectual Georgette (Julianne Moore), who has “tenure at Columbia” – the kind of phrase that doesn’t appear much in screenplays these days. Soon, Maggie has a different plan in mind.
It is a witty, sharp comedy that moves along at an invigorating clip, though not at the correct speed for “screwball” or “neo-screwball”, which is how I’ve seen this film described. The disclosures about who is linked to whom are cleverly managed, and there are some funny and sweet-natured thoughts on how fate can mess up our plans. As John puts it: “Unborn children are the real gods.” You might want to make a plan to see this.
- This article was amended on Monday 1 August 2016. We mistakenly said Greta Gerwig’s character was an anthropology lecturer. In fact, Ethan Hawke’s character holds that job. Her character is an art dealer. This has been corrected.
