Truly, maddeningly deeply — a heroine worthy of Austen ...
Maggie’s Plan (15) Verdict: Sharp, warm and witty MAGGIE, honestly played in a series of earnest but fetching ladyacademic outfits by Greta Gerwig, is the most endearingly infuriating heroine since Jane Austen’s Emma.
She teaches some sort of anthropology ’ n’ design module to earnest NYC students, and plans a solo baby because her relationships never last and she ‘doesn’t want to leave her destiny to Destiny’.
Her no- strings sperm donor is Guy, a great woolly-hatted teddybear of a hipster who makes artisan pickles.
But no sooner has she done the deed than she falls for John, a colleague wrapped in writing an awful novel, based on his scratchy marriage with a cleverer, temperamental wife: Julianne Moore in a savage topknot and wounded eyes, described in the novel as having ‘hair like a river of snakes and a temper like an angry mink’.
Maggie vows to support him while his genius develops. Roll on two years and she is coping with her toddler and frequent custody of his two children while their divorced mother studies ‘Icelandic maternal culture’ in Reykjavik.
Maggie now wants nothing better than to give the idle, self-absorbed man back. Which she plots to do.
It is funny, sharp, and horribly perceptive about the female vice of trying to control, nurture, support and have everything perfect. And, indeed, about the kind of man who actually needs to be needed, not just nurtured. Ethan Hawke is splendid as John, who one constantly longs to slap, Moore hilarious as the brittle Georgette.
I loved it, enjoying the shifting, laughingly sour family tale but also helplessly amused by the witty writer-director Rebecca Miller’s sly portrait of American academe (‘he’s one of the bad boys of fictocultural anthropology’ and the flirtatious ‘nobody unpacks commodity fetishism like you do’).
She adds the deft fleeting insight that the most decent of them all is Guy the pickle man. He, too, was a gifted student, a Maths major, but loved mathematics for ‘the beauty . . . just to touch the hem of it’ and happily moves on to earning an honest living with fancy pickles.
Whereas the awful academics run after status, showing off at conferences and tenured jobs.