* * * Stars | Romantic Comedy. R. 98 minutes.
“Nobody unpacks commodity fetishism like you do.”
Such a statement counts as billing and cooing in “Maggie’s Plan,” a sneakily winning romantic comedy that, despite its ungainliness and sometimes irritatingly broad characters, brings welcome sharpness to a genre usually awash in soft-focus hearts and flowers.
A remarriage farce set in the rarefied, jargon-filled world of New York academia (see above), filmmaker Rebecca Miller’s venture into satire takes a comfortable place on a shelf already occupied by Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach and Nicole Holofcener.
Best known for such dramas as “Personal Velocity” and “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee,” Miller doesn’t possess the structural and tonal chops of those directors, or at least not yet. But “Maggie’s Plan” exerts unmistakable charm, and once it hits its stride, the movie really soars.
Greta Gerwig plays the title character, a bright 30-ish woman who works at the New School for Social Research and has decided she wants to be a mother. After forthrightly deciding to go it alone, Maggie meets John (Ethan Hawke), a “ficto-critical anthropologist” who’s enmeshed in a troubled marriage to Georgette (Julianne Moore), an intellectually imposing author for whom he has subsumed his own writerly ambitions.
An affair between needy John and the yielding Maggie is inescapable, as is the breakup and blended families that follow — developments that prompt a case of cold feet in Maggie, who decides to manipulate John and Georgette into getting back together.
It’s the stuff of classic screwball comedy, a genre Miller eagerly embraces, if not with the deft command of the masters. The characters — inspired by an unpublished novel by editor and publisher Karen Rinaldi — come dangerously close to caricatures, especially Moore’s vaguely Teutonic embodiment of post-structuralism at its most humorless and rigid — but the actors infuse them with such spirit and sympathy that “Maggie’s Plan” takes on the glow and infectious warmth of an ensemble piece fired by genuine, spiky affection.
But even regarded outside the lens of real-life, the film offers a gently jaundiced, always generous view of so many dynamics that animate love and commitment.
True to its title, “Maggie’s Plan” is so crazy that it just might work — and it does.
