Maggie’s Plan

That fate keeps throwing Maggie (Greta Gerwig) curveballs matters not to a woman determined to control her own destiny in Rebecca Miller’s low-key screwball romantic comedy. The New School counselor doesn’t pause in her zeal to map out her future even when life never seems to work out as planned. Things get messier when she meets John (Ethan Hawke), an adjunct ficto-critical anthropology professor turned budding novelist, and can’t help but try to steer the fortunes of both him and his formidable Danish wife Gretchen (Julianne Moore). Miller adapted her screenplay from an unpublished novel by Karen Rinaldi to spin a tale that is smart, funny and insightful about not just the charming control freak at its center, but also in its observations of the academic world the characters inhabit and the lives of 21st-century New Yorkers. Gerwig’s brand of ditzy intelligence well suits the character, while Hawke excels as a boy man whose solipsism combined with a tendency to go with the flow creates domestic chaos. Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph add to the hilarity as Maggie’s best friends, a bickering married couple comfortable in their combat zone, but it is Moore who delivers the biggest laughs as the acerbic, tightly wound academic. —Pam Grady