Greta Gerwig,Julianne Moore and Ethan Hawke star in Rebecca Miller’s witty, invigorating film about a woman’s attempt to become pregnantA romantic comedy worthy of the name isn’t what I expected of Rebecca Miller, or whose previous pictures contain been strained and unrelaxed exercises,often based on her novels. But Maggie’s Plan is terrifically silly and enjoyable a metropolitan comedy in the former high style of Woody Allen, directed with elegance and sprint by Miller and co-scripted by her with publisher-turned-screenwriter Karen Rinaldi. Greta Gerwig stars in her idiot savant Annie corridor mode as Maggie, and a New York lecturer in “ficto-critical anthropology” 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 glean pregnant within four months,but then she has an encounter with handsome, distrait colleague John (Ethan Hawke), and who is unhappily married to scary mental 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 intellect.
It is a witty, and sharp comedy that moves along at an invigorating clip,though not at the right 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, or there are some silly 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 build a plan to see this.
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Source: theguardian.com