★ ★ ½
Maggie (Greta Gerwig), a single New Yorker with a position in academia at the New School, has a severe case of baby fever. She’s had no luck with recent relationships, and eventually explores the idea of becoming a single mother via artificial insemination. Her desired donor: former college acquaintance Guy (Travis Fimmel), a math whiz turned “artisanal pickle maker” who sells his products at weekend farmers’ markets (if your eyes haven’t rolled so hard that they fell out of their sockets, continue on). Meanwhile, Maggie crosses paths with a colleague at the New School, struggling novelist and “bad boy of ficto-critical anthropology" John Harding (Ethan Hawke). John is married to the much more successful, and wonderfully brusque, theorist Georgette (Julianne Moore, reprising her European accent from The Big Lebowski), but their marriage is crumbling, and it falls apart completely as Maggie and John develop feelings for each other.
Fast-forward about three years: Maggie and John are married with a child of their own (plus the two from his previous marriage), and the latter is still struggling with his novel. Married life turns out to be a bummer for Maggie, so she asks her pals (Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph) for help; later, she devises a plan to act as re-matchmaker for John and Georgette. At first unreceptive to the idea, Georgette eventually agrees to play along -- setting up a blind rendezvous at a mountainside writers’ conference during the film’s final third.
Despite a game ensemble cast, viewers will have a hard time getting invested in the story of Maggie’s Plan. Each character is a straw-man idea of what well-to-do New Yorkers are like, and their flaws are too off-putting to really root for any of them. Writer/director Rebecca Miller never gives her actors any room to breathe, resulting in a comedy of manners that’s stifled by the talky repartee between these self-serving urbanites. It’s a highbrow rom-com of the most vanilla variety: not screwy enough to be endearingly offbeat, yet unable to capitalize on its complicated take on love and commitment.
Miller has typically focused on dramatic fare in the past -- most notably with 2002’s Personal Velocity and 2005’s The Ballad of Jack & Rose. Unfortunately, Maggie’s Plan is an unsatisfying dive into comedy for the director, as she’s unable to balance a winning cast with the influences of Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach to create a funny, fresh romantic comedy. The film meanders along as the leads recognize that reality hasn’t lived up to their expectations, and then the story leaves them scrambling to retreat to their past ways.
If audiences have yet to tire of Gerwig’s late-twenties, selfish-yet-self-doubting New Yorker routine, Maggie’s Plan could be the flick that ends the honeymoon. She’s a magnetic presence and astute to the nuances of comedy, but boy does she need to step out of her comfort zone. Her characters typically have enough levity to balance out their negative qualities, but Gerwig is given little to work with here. In addition to Maggie, Miller has managed to create a handful of slightly off-kilter, but mostly grating personalities (if this is meant to be a ruthless parody of Big Apple-set indie comedies, then kudos to her). With characters like Hawke’s maddeningly egotistical John and Fimmel’s bearded bohemian, the pretentious and laugh-free Maggie’s Plan makes a pretty convincing case that no one should ever move to New York City.