Rebecca Miller: Modern love in Maggie's Plan
Writer-director Rebecca Miller tackles modern life at its fullest in her new feature Maggie's Plan, starring Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawk and Julianne Moore
Contemporary life is messy and rarely goes according to plan. However, if you're like Greta Gerwig’s Maggie in Rebecca Miller’s latest feature, you'll face this challenge head on, striding confidently in the face of adversity because you know what you want. And what Maggie wants is a baby – but she doesn’t have a partner. Fortunately, she has found a sperm donor who meets her criteria, in the form of a mathematical prodigy and pickling company owner (played by Warcraft star Travis Fimmel).
This is the opening gambit of Miller’s fifth feature, Maggie’s Plan, a quirky, screwball rom-com with weighty themes running underneath. While Miller’s previous films had comic elements, their footing was much more at home in drama. Miller, the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and Magnum photographer Inge Morath, is also the author of several novels, including Personal Velocity and the recently published Jacob’s Folly.
Greta Gerwig and Ethan Hawk in Maggie's Plan
Casting Gerwig, the queen of American indie cinema, as Maggie was an astute choice. The star is certainly on familiar ground with her character. Miller, speaking on the phone from New York, describes Maggie as “a very capable, smart, yet somewhat bumbling person who has her own eccentric ethical code and lives by it.” The director is happy to admit that there's some of herself in her lead character’s qualities: “I think there are elements of her particular brand of bossiness – like a shepherd dog's bossiness – that I share. Trying to get people to do things for their own good.” At Maggie’s core there is always a good intention even if, as Miller puts it, “she's always thinking of ways to help people, even if she's totally messing up their lives while helping them.” She explains that with a character like Maggie, Gerwig was perfect because “[she] is very intelligent but she is wholesome and innocent with it. She is a tremendous comic actress with great emotional reserves.”
Of course, by casting Gerwig, Miller’s film is likely to be compared to recent work by Noah Baumbach (who frequently collaborates with Gerwig, as well as being her off-screen partner). Like his films, Maggie's Plan possesses screwball elements, rom-com tropes and is set in New York. Maggie's Plan also shares elements of Woody Allen features, minus the crippling neurosis, although Miller shows an equal love for New York, which is sumptuously captured by her director of photography Sam Levy (who, while we are at it, also shot Baumbach’s monochromatic comedy Frances Ha).
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Miller’s film does stand apart, however. It possesses a richness absent from recent Allen films and is a long way from the hipster-vibe of Baumbach, weighted in more mature themes. While the tone of Maggie’s Plan is gleefully off-the-wall, the film manages to balance hefty issues ranging from divorce, marriage, single-parenting and the film’s over-arching theme of self-determination. Maggie’s attempts to get pregnant is put on pause when she encounters novelist and lecturer John (Ethan Hawke) at New York’s New School, where she works as an administrator. John, described by Maggie’s best friend (played by Maya Rudolph) as a ‘panty-melter’, wins Maggie’s heart – the only problem is he is married to a fearsome Danish ficto-critical anthropologist, played to perfection by Julianne Moore.
Miller previously worked with Moore on her 2009 feature The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. She explains their working relationship: “I love our collaborations. We share a desire to go very far down a path in our work. We are not afraid of extremes.” It's fair to say that they do go to extremes, with Moore stealing much of the limelight. It's also fair to say that ficto-critical anthropology is not a subject that many of us encounter on a daily basis, but Miller is able to clarify her decision to focus on this odd subsection of anthropology. “Ficto-critical anthropology was introduced to me by my scholar friend Barbara Browning. She said when she read my first draft, 'These people seem like ficto-critical anthropologists.' I started researching the field, and I was in heaven as you can imagine.” The tenants of ficto-critical anthropology bizarrely provide many of the film’s most comedic moments, allowing Ethan Hawke’s John and Moore’s Georgette to lovingly quip at one another, playing mental chess as Gerwig’s character gazes on and wonders if perhaps these two love birds would be better off together.
“I think comedy is a very civilising force. If we can laugh at ourselves, there is hope”
The film’s screenplay is written by Miller but began life as an unfinished novel by her friend Karen Rinaldi. “Karen sent me the chapters having to do with Maggie, Georgette and John. The love triangle appealed to me and I thought the hook was funny.” While the set-up of the love triangle attracted Miller to use it for her next project, it was also the opportunity to take the issues explored by Rinaldi and look at them through a comic lens that appealed. “I had written a humorous book, Jacob's Folly, and I was in the mood for laughs. I was exhausted from writing the novel and I wanted something that I could shoot in New York where my kids were in school. I think comedy is a very civilising force. If we can laugh at ourselves, there is hope.”
At the core of Maggie’s Plan is the subject of choice – who to love, who to have children with (if you want them at all), whether to get married or even whether to get divorced. At the root of many of these questions lies the complexity of modern love. As our conversation draws to a close Miller explains her attitude to a modern marriage: “Marriage these days is totally elective and so a kind of creative act. You are choosing each other anew every day. With our freedom comes responsibility – and confusion.”
Maggie’s Plan is released 8 Jul by Sony