I read that Greta Gerwig once described Lena Dunham as a kind of Oprah to hipsters, and it occurred to me that one could posit the lineage of many Gerwig characters as a kind of female Antoine Doinel (early origins notwithstanding) to some women making their way, circa now.
I mentioned this to Gerwig during the press junket for Maggie’s Plan, and though flattered by the comparison, she added that she doesn’t write, nor select projects with an idea for a continuous arc, and instead enjoys “portraying women in all different stages of life”.
FILE UNDER: Actors gamely switching it up and talking philosophy, life in NYC, during a press junket.
Greta Gerwig talks about being a Philosophy major, Quakers and history; Ethan Hawke talks about how The Doe Fund works.
In Maggie’s Plan, Gerwig, shambling through (by way of yet another French cinema comparison) her own brand of self-possessed and humble gait, à la Jacques Tati, enacts the film’s titular possessive case, gently upending the cruelly clichéd scenario of the younger (just-turned thirty) woman falling for and getting played by a married-with-kids man, whilst also reversing the gender roles of Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May”, specifically with professor Maggie, after deciding that she’s ready to have child on her own and, well, self-inseminating with a payload solicited from, and proffered ― via plastic jar ― by a college acquaintance named Guy (Travis Fimmel), a bearded, high-minded, Math Major turned lone-wolf pickler-cum-entreprenneur), subsequent to which ― in fact, mid-insemination ― she, as you know from the trailer, unexpectedly falls in, and will eventually fall out of, love with professor John Harding (Ethan Hawke).
And so, through Maggie’s varyingly lucid and obscured quest for an authentic existence, we come to ken the psychological warfare, the mutual denial mechanisms of the decade, decade-and-a-half older generation she’s stepping in and out of, in the forms of professors Georgette Nørgaard (Julianne Moore) and Harding. And like in Frances Ha, Gerwig’s character also sees the anti-climax in the lives of her successful, married-with-children friends from college, an early-paired Tony and Felicia (Maya Rudolph and Bill Hader), now a ostensibly ― and, relativism prevailing, genuinely happy ― lawyer and professor.
That said, there are no Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe? ructions here; even a drunken rant by Tony, during which he expresses disgust with his life, is absorbed by Felicia, confident that this eruption will lapse into anti-climax, like it always does. Indeed, this is a universe wherein narcissists and workaday folk find ― and stay with ― their natural partners.
As for the trad wife and ex-wife enmity paradigm, what we get instead is the cooperation and temporary co-habitation of the wives, which Gerwig notes during the interview as something she she’d never seen in a film before, and this consideration of women’s roles reminded me to ask her about the designation of Maggie as a Quaker (see video).
Whether or not Maggie will find a partner, I leave for you to discover.
Maggie’s Plan is now playing in select cities.