Maggie’s Plan (15)

WE used to know exactly what we were going to get from modern romantic comedy. Boy meets girl, they spar, they fall in love, a crisis divides them, it all comes right in the end. He would be Hugh Grant or Tom Hanks, she Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock. Rote romance, filmmaking by numbers.

After a deserved period in the doldrums, romcom has been slowly finding its feet again, with the best ones taking a different form. Characters are less predictable, the comedy vested as much in situations and individuals as couples and romance. With films like Silver Linings Playbook and Crazy, Stupid, Love, the genre has become more fluid, and much more interesting.

And that’s the case with Maggie’s Plan, the first comedy from writer/director Rebecca Miller. Greta Gerwig is Maggie Hardin, a thirty-something working in the careers department of a New York university. Maggie is single and has limited experience of relationships. And her first plan, in what could be seen as the film’s extended prologue, is not romantic at all.

Maggie has decided to have a child alone, entering a sperm donor arrangement with an old college acquaintance, now “pickle entrepreneur” (Travis Fimmel). She’s unaware that the sweet, handsome but shy chap is smitten with her. In any case, the arrival at the college of esteemed anthropologist John Harding (Ethan Hawke) throws Maggie an unexpected curve ball.

Harding is married, with two children. He’s also at a vulnerable moment, feeling decidedly inferior to his formidable wife and fellow academic Georgette Nørgaard (Julianne Moore), while nervously trying his hand at fiction writing. Maggie proves an enthusiastic reader, and they spend more and more time together over his book, until they fall in love.

Here Miller does something incredibly audacious: she jumps forward three years. Despite some dramatic changes, Maggie still doesn’t feel satisfied. But now she believes that she can better resolve everyone’s happiness, with just a little manipulation. Hence her second plan and the main business of the film.

There is nothing conventional about Miller’s take on romcom. For a start, it doesn’t feature the preordained union of two romantic figures, but an unusual love triangle, with a fourth figure lingering in the wings, in a scenario that could resolve itself any which way. The romance is unusually day-to-day, mixed with people’s desire for security, companionship and family. And there are no heroes or villains, with even Moore’s icy academic thawing as the film progresses.

In fact, it’s crucial that we have a degree of sympathy for everyone. And in achieving this the actors are pitch perfect.

There’s something of Austen’s Emma in Maggie, that combination of well-meaning innocence and the presumption to know what’s best for others. Gerwig is in her element, presenting a woman who’s less chaotic and inchoate than her characters in Frances Ha and Mistress America, but still a well-meaning disaster zone, whose machinations lead to some gloriously novel situations.

Hawke also has no problem embodying Harding's mix of charm, sincerity and self-absorption. But best of all is Moore. After some depressing roles, including the Alzheimer’s sufferer in Still Alice, it’s good to see her back in comic vein. With her Danish accent accentuating Georgette’s haughty superiority, the performance reminds me of her avant-garde artist in The Big Lebowski. It’s the funniest thing in a very funny film.

Miller’s earnest dramas (the last was The Private Lives of Pippa Lee) don’t prepare you for the zinging dialogue and lightness of touch that she shows here, or for a film that could be key to the future direction of romantic comedy.

Also released

The Neon Demon (18)

Much hype surrounds the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, largely through the success of his existential crime thriller Drive. But his subsequent film, Only God Forgives, was lurid and nasty. And his new, slick horror, set in the LA fashion world, is a nadir of style over content.

Elle Fanning plays 15-year-old Jesse, who shows up in town with steely ambition to be a model, and whose instant success is greeted with incredulity, then hostility by her stick-thin rivals.

Refn is a consummate image maker – the city and Jesse’s photo shoots are truly ravishing – and he again has composer Cliff Martinez to drape his images in atmospheric audio. Between them they create moments of horror weirdness that evoke David Lynch, which can only be good. However, Lynch has a deep well of mystery and substance beneath his surface strangeness; Refn has nothing. Despite the nature of its gory surprises, what could have been an interesting satire is ultimately toothless.