Maggie's Plan and the Easy Devolution of Life, Boundaries and Old Fashioned Story Telling

 There was hope that this film, well reviewed by critics, and recommended by a friend mutual to Len Speaks and me, would finally conquer the spate of films well reviewed by critics and recommended by friends that were just awful. Hello My Name is Doris, The Meddler and The Family Fang.

I report thusly. I didn't hate Maggie's Plan. I even kind of liked it. So, here's the story. Maggie (played by Greta Gerwig) is a thirty something single working at the New School in Manhattan who wants a child but has no romantic prospect. She has singled out a mathematician-pickle maker (yes, yes, that's what he is) friend, Guy (Travis Fimmell) to be the donor of sperm. He suggests the usual method of delivery. She declines, preferring a messy self injection in her bathtub. As this chapter of her solo life is about to unfold, she has met an adjunct professor of anthropology, John (Ethan Hawke) also at the New School, who fancies himself a novelist, but whose incipient talents appear to be a matter of indifference to his wife (Jullianne Moore) a rather famous professor at Columbia. In fact, John unknowingly interrupts the sperm injection  by appearing at Maggie's apartment so that further chapters of his novel (a thinly disguised lament on his married life with Georgette, his wife) may be praised unflinchingly by Maggie. On this is their quickie relationship built, and Maggie forgoes self insemination for the usual kind with her adjunct professor whom she also marries leaving the older Georgette in the proverbial dust of her older age. Maggie and John have a child who it is suggested might be Guy's mathematically inclined progeny-so that the injection of his sperm might not have been a-miss. This avenue is left unexplored in the movie.  But Georgette, and John's two children by their marriage, are still very much part of John and Maggie's life, well, more Maggie as she becomes the soccer mom Georgette never was and John could remain an absentee father.  Maggie realizes after her daughter is about two or three that her marriage to John was based on the flimsiest of premises, that John isn't much of a writer, but he is very much self absorbed, and hatches the plan of the title to give him back to Georgette, with whom she has developed a solidly cool friendship. Georgette and John it turns out are really perfect for each other as ships passing in the night who happened to manage to have two children who will probably end up in a years long unsuccessful therapy (that could be another movie entirely).

So Maggie sets it up that John will meet up "by chance" with Georgette at a conference in Canada. And that faithfulness will once again go by the boards (that's my take) and the ships will collide over anthropology talk and snow bound rebound romance. And so it happens. Oh, yes, What was wanted was not really what was wanted and the ships, so to speak, are righted.

In the old days of movies, everyone would have been punished. Not that I am suggesting I want this to have happened to Maggie, Georgette et. al. I am a creature of the generation in which I live, and so, as I said, I found the film distressingly enjoyable. Distressingly, because everything about it just proves we are living in a cesspool of moral confusion. No boundaries. Feel it. Do it. Three kids? Good luck to them. This is our world. There are no bright lines. And doing what is right? Like not having affairs on a spouse? Like delaying gratification?

What bothers me? It is that I am so immersed in the ambiguities of my society, of everything around me, I actually am NOT bothered by the fact that these people have no rules or respect for other human beings such that they recognize the destruction they wreck.

The old movies? Well, they were full of it too, right?  I mean, it was never boy meets girl, girl marries boy and they live happily ever after. Fact is, boy met girl, boy married girl, they had children who heard them fight night after night their whole lives, but "stayed together " for the kids. That wasn't better was it?

I'm thinking that maybe what was better is that there were rules, and rights and obligations. The weakness of those times was that there was a pretense that no one ever failed and that caused too many heartaches, but at least there was some ideal, some things that were transgressions, that weren't, shall we say, a good idea.

There is nothing to guide us anymore. Well, there is, but that seems rather, how shall we say, amusingly outre.

I guess it would be too boring for Maggie to meet a nice guy, get married, form a little society with two and one half children, and celebrate her 50th anniversary. It wouldn't make much of a movie these days.  But I think I just might watch "How Green Was My Valley" tonight about two heroic people who fell in love but did not break up families to indulge themselves.