New York Film Festival 2015

[Chris Knipp]

ROBERT ZEMECKIS: THE WALK (2015)


Image from The Walk

High above Seventies NYC on a wire -- a time when CGI and 3D make perfect sense

It happened early in the morning of 7 August 1974. Philippe Petit, the French high wire performer, then just short of his twenty-fifth birthday, appearing out of nowhere in lower Manhattan atop the highest buildings in the city of New York, carried out the greatest exploit of his career. Working with accomplices, he secretly strung a wire between corners of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, then barely completed, and astonished the world by walking back and forth gently and playfully between them, eight passes, in the stratosphere, an act of sublime beauty and insane boldness. This was done illegally. He did not have a permit, and had he applied he wold never have got one. It was a bold and secret operation. It was also a dazzling performance, a work of art, a reaching for the infinite and the void and a defiance of death.

It is astonishing and thrilling to contemplate this exploit. James Marsh's wonderful 2008 documentary Man on Wire allows us to do that and explores how Petit did it in the greatest detail, filling us in on his life, his training, the long planning and practice, his collaborators, and his loves and the materials used, how they were spirited into the building and up to the rooftops -- all of that is in Marsh's film. Why should Zemeckis want to make a feature film about it? Two reasons, basically: Joseph Gordon-Levitt and 3D (plus CGI). Joe is a bold and confident young actor (not as young as Petit was, but that's okay) -- bold enough to speak French convincingly in the film and narrate it all through standing on the Statue of Liberty's torch (working from Petit's memoir, To Reach the Clouds) with a plausible fake French accent, which is pretty much a tightrope act in itself. He carries it off. He looks and sounds convincing. And he does the high wire walking, or a lot of it, himself, and beautifully.

The thing that Marsh's fine documentary could not do is show "The Walk" in motion from above. There is no actual film footage of Petit's "coup," only stills. Zemeckis provides us with a dazzling bird's eye view of Petit walking on the wire with the city below -- in 3D. I've never been a fan of 3D. But when we get to the spectacular shots of the wire, the man, the Towers, and the city below recreated in CGI, this format makes sense and greatly enhances what is most essential, the sense of space the breathtaking, scrotum- tightening excitement of The Walk -- or as Petit calls it, "the coup," as elegantly depicted in the film. This is a movie making a wild dream come true, and Zemeckis' use of current film technology simply realizes the dream.

Along the way, there are good performances and much Seventies atmosphere through recreated New York cityscape, men's hairstyles and clothes. Notable among the subsidiary performances are Ben Kingsley as Papa Rudy, the tight-rope mentor, and Charlotte Le Bon as Annie, Petit's girlfriend and collaborator of the time who, however, went back to France when the exploit was over and Petit decided to remain in New York. Gordon-Levitt begins the film (after a sequence of young Philippe played by Soleyman Pierini) showing Petit's life as a juggler and street performer in Paris who made international news by tightrope-walking across the towers of Notre Dame. But the overriding topic is the Twin Towers walk. Don't expect more. It should be enough. (See Debruge's Variety review for details of the accomplices and the actors who play them. Debruge feels the iMax film slights details in the wire-to-ground shots. I was looking at the space, and did not care.)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who is now thirty-four, looks like a little guy, not a leading man, but since his childhood in Los Angeles he has had an astonishing and slowly growing career that exhibits originality, taste and panache, running from TV and A River Runs Through It as a child actor, Angels in the Outfield and 10 Things I Hate About You, playing Tommy in the TV series "3rd Rock from the Sun" and taking a break to attend Columbia University (when he went up in the Twin Towers). Joe's been one to watch, always with interesting choices and various films like 500 Days of Summer, Inception, Hesher, 50/50, Premium Rush, The Dark Knight Rises, Brick, Looper, The Lookout, Manic, Lincoln, Mysterious Skin and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra -- roles notable for boldness and variety. And a couple years ago, Joe wrote, directed, and starred in his own first film, Don Jon. Next he will be seen as the star of a film about Edward Snowden -- another kind of rule-breaking maverick -- by Oliver Stone. Joe has earned the right to play a true original like Philippe Petit and he owns this role.

The Walk, 124 mins., 3D, premiered at the New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review. It was the festival's opening night film, presented Saturday, 26 Sept. 2015 (delayed by one day from the original starting date of the 25th due to Pope Francis' New York visit). Also in Rome and Tokyo festivals according to Debruge. It opens in NYC theaters at three locations beginning Wed., 30 Sept. A Sony Pictures release. See P&I Q&I here.

[Chris Knipp]

YORGOS LANTHIMOS: THE LOBSTER(2015)


COLIN FARRELL AND RACHEL WEISZ IN THE LOBSTER

Hell is being forced to mate, say they

Greek cinematic provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos delivers his third collaboration with friend and co-writer Efthymis Filippou in The Lobster. It is a funny but also very, very cruel satire on the way society puts pressure on people to live in couples. But does it? Don't they want to live in couples? What's the point, really? Anyway, Lanthemos and Filippou take a premise and then play with it. In their future world those who lack or have lost a mate are sent by The City to The Hotel, really a kind of minimum security prison, where they live under strict rules. Above all they have 45 days to find a mate, and if they fail, are turned into the animal of their choice and cast out into The Woods to survive or be killed. Protagonist David (a paunchy Colin Farrell), sent to The Hotel to find a new mate as a result of a recent divorce, chooses that if he must be turned he will be a lobster because they live 100 years and remain fertile life-long.

From the beginning, when we follow a lady we never see again on a car ride to a field where she shoots a horse, The Lobster is strange, disquieting, and chillingly sure of itself. Somehow Lanthimos seems working with a broader palette here than in Dogtooth or Alps (also done with Filippou), and due, some think, to acquire a wider audience as his austere festival rep grows, and given that this time he's working in English (with a bit of French) and has gathered a name-actor cast (including Léa Seydoux and Rachel Weisz).

Because it's a Hotel whose rules are enigmatic and a film that is artificial I was reminded of Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad. The Lobster is similarly arid -- but without the haunting, rhythmic elegance, of course. In fact this comparison was grasping at straws, because Marienbad is a dreamlike Neverland one might in some fantasy like being lost in, but The City, The Hotel, and The Wood are Orwellian Hells. Or, as Guy Lodge more positively puts it in his Variety review, Lanthimos "takes his ongoing fascination with artificially constructed community to its dizziest, most Buñuelian extreme to date" with The Lobster. Ah yes, Buñuel.

Coupling doesn't seem to happen very often at The Hotel and in two examples we see, they're on desperate false pretenses. Ben Whishaw tries to fake habitual nosebleeds to connect with a young woman with this ailment. David pretends to be completely without emotion to link up with a woman who's utterly cold, but she uncovers his pretense through a deeply nasty gesture. Don't critics who praise this film's sardonic wit not see how profoundly repellent it is?

This is a conceptual game whose crude absurdities indeed are, at first, amusing -- the fact that most people chose to be turned into dogs, for instance. David has arrived with one, which turns out to be his (former) brother. Likewise oddly droll is the fact that couples can only pair off if they share a common fault, like a limp (Ben Whishaw) or a lisp (John C. Reilly), or a lack of any feeling, or a tendency to nosebleeds. Sex is referred to crudely, masturbation forbidden. Preposterously, female Hotel employes come to rooms to fellate "guests" like David with their buttocks.

"Guests" are sent out every day to The Wood with rifles to kill escapees from this system who're called Loners and are led by a stony-faced Léa Seydoux. Loners can't mate or love, but they can have conversations. Living as a Loner in The Wood is the only alternative to coupling or being turned to an animal. David winds up out there and falls in love with Rachel Weisz. The ending is, after all, an abandonment of cold-hearted rule-making in favor of desperate love, and perhaps a last-minute effort to make up for all the preceding nastiness.

I found the world of The Lobster even more off-putting than those of Lanthimos' two previous films. But devotees of puzzle-pictures may enjoy re-watching and pondering the film's many enigmatic incidents whose meanings may grow in retrospect. My feeling is that Filippou and Lanthimos' construction is something they made up as they went along, and internal consistency and overall logic take second place to playful provocation.

The Lobster, 118 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes May 2015 and included in many other international festivals since. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 New York Film Festival. Coming to US theaters as an Alchemy release.

A24 is releasing the film in the US starting May 13, 2016.

[Chris Knipp]

ZHANG YI AND SHAO TAO IN MOUNTAINS MAY DEPART

Lost generation - or lost touch?

Continuing his preoccupation with changes in modern China, which he delineated so richly in Platform, Unknown Pleasures, The World and Still Life, Jia Zhangke divides his new feature Mountains May Depart into segments set in 1999, 2014, and 2025, advancing toward a dystopian future where spoiled Chinese sons (represented in (represented in Dollar, played by the interesting but somewhat marooned Dong Zijian) can only communicate with their fathers through an interpreter and electronic devices have alienated people who once were alive to each other in the old fashioned ways before the Internet and cell phones came. A long-contemplated project (like other Jia works) this contains saved video footage of discos leading to three different, progressively larger but more alienating, aspect ratios.

The idea of it is fascinating and the explanation given by Jia in interviews (at the New York Film Festival Q&A's, with an superb interpreter who never dropped a nuance) absolutely clear. But the fact of the film itself is less exciting filmmaking than his individually rich and dense, if overall patchy, previous film A Touch of Sin (NYFF 2013)

To begin with it is obviously schematic to give Shen Tao (Zhao Tao) two contrasting suitors, a rich entrepreneur (Zhang - Zhang Yi) and an honest man of the people (doomed Liangzi - Liang Jin Dong, who goes far away and gets lung disease working in deplorable conditions). The segment about Liangzi seems tacked on and sentimental, everything about Zhang overblown and crude. Then, what can he be getting at in giving the grown up son of divorced Zhang and Shen Tao, Dollar (Dong Ziian, an interesting actor but marooned here) a lover old enough to be his mother? And can we really believe that in the fifteen years from age seven to age twenty-two, living in Australia, he could have completely forgotten how to speak Mandarin, and require Mia (Sylvia Chang), his teacher-girlfriend, as interpreter to communicate with his own father? For that matter what has his father been doing in Australia all this time if he has not learned the basics of English? The final Dollar sequence seems like a bold and crude B-picture.

The early scenes between Shen Tao, Zhang and Lianzi, in square format and bright color to signify a simpler, pre-Internet pre-handheld device, pre-mega-capitalist China and to fit with Jia's earliest saved disco videos, read like silent film, but without any real beauty. Jia appears to have forgotten how to convey the rich kitsch of transitional China as he did in Pickpocket, Platform, and Unknown Pleasures and, as perhaps The World showed, his concept of how things are now may be a bit artificial -- because different eras coexist in "real life," and things aren't so schematic as he now wants to make them. Highly developed concepts and ideas are getting in the way of the the filmmaker's native instincts.

In the interesting Q&A at Lincoln Center after the press screening, Jia explained that he did a lot of interviews in different countries as a basis for this film. But can life be made up out of interviews?

Mountains May Depart/Shan he gu ren/山河故人, 131 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2015. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 New York Film Festival.

[Chris Knipp]

TODD HAYNES: CAROL (2015)


ROONEY MARA IN CAROL

Glamorous prison of conventionality

Carol, Todd Haynes' adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's early novel The Price of Salt, is a swoon. Despite its edge of late Forties-early Fifties homophobia and otherwise rigid convention, the movie is rapturously beautiful, beginning with Highsmiith's declared inspiration, a glamorous blonde lady in a fur coat appearing in a department store just before Christmas who meets a young clerk and they fall in love. Cate Blanchett appears to Rooney Mara like a dream. She has a slightly fuzzy glow about her like old Hollywood publicity portraits. Haynes revels in period costume, set, and those invaluable vintage cars. (It looks as if everybody drives a Packard, a Cadillac, or a Hudson.) You need to fall right away under the aesthetic spell of the movie's lovely images (they are a combination of splendid mise-en-scène and the Super-16 film magic of Ed Lachman). If you don't, watching Carol will be no fun at all. It will be like plodding through marshmallow, or honey. It is appropriate that in the story Carol's young beloved is an aspiring photographer. We are aware of photographic images from first to last. There are some hazy street images that could have been the early color work of Saul Leiter.

When Carol and Therese run away together to motels like Lolita and Humbert Humbert one is reminded of the Italian countess cited by Salvador Dalí in his Secret Life eating ice cream, when it had first been invented, who declared that if only it were a sin it would be perfect. Carol (Blanchett) loses custody of her little girl because Harge (Kyle Chandler) proves she is involved in unnatural behavior. This is a time when same-sex relations were shrouded in mystery and unknowing and also had the dangerous excitement of being forbidden. Gay artists may be occasionally allowed the wicked nostalgia of reveling in that lost naughtiness. This is not the dangerous transgression of Brokeback Mountain but a rich lady and an essentially unattached young woman (her tie to boyfriend Jake Lacy is frangible) in the sophisticated world of New York city.

Let us qualify the statement that Carol was Highsmith's first novel by pointing out that it was published at first under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. It is also not like most of her other fiction, which generally concerns evildoing. But then, remember the countess. At this time, the love of Carol and Therese could be seen as a crime, and they are being followed by a detective, from whom they escape after he catches up with them, like something Tom Ripley would do. But it's not easy or necessary to connect this novel to Highsmith's other work. The connection is that Highsmith herself was a lesbian, and she was working in a department store like Therese when a woman in a fur coat came in, and she ran home and wrote out the scheme of the novel. For the way the rich lady's husband uses her lesbianism to skew the divorce in his favor Highsmoth drew on the experiences of her own former love, a Philadelphia socialite.

And voilà! You have the very simple setup on which an elaborate and wonderful edifice of teasing and expectation is built. The devil is in the details, the delays, as Therese and Carol navigate their way toward each other past convention, prohibition, and inexperience. Blanchett and Mara work wonders together. Both are terrific, though only Mara got the acting prize at Cannes. This is a wold of underplaying, where atmosphere allows period to bloom so the touch of a hand brings a frisson and Carol rushes to put on her shoes when Harge appears and finds her with Therese -- because removed shoes with a guest is négligé. It is nearly an hour of unhurried screen time before that first kiss. This too like the beauty of Ed Lachman's images you must tune into, or you are lost and instead of swooning, will yawn.

As for the images, Mike D'Angelo declares in his Dissolve Cannes review that the "vivid retro look" can be clearly distinguished from both the "Technicolor lushness" of his other period same sex study Far From Heaven, and the "drab claustrophobia" of his Mildred Pierce miniseries, all shot by Ed Lachman. The Carol images are the most unabashedly exquisite as the film is the most celebratory. Carol doesn't really suffer. Though "just when things couldnt be worse" she runs out of cigarettes. That's as bad as it gets. She adores her daughter, and yet she is willing to give her up if necessary. This may be essentially a "problem" picture like Far from Heaven, but I don't have the same problems this time. Carol is unquestionably one of the best and most unique American films of the year and one of the most enjoyable. Its images, its lead performances, and the Carter Burwell music are to be savored.

Carol, 118 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2015; about a dozen festival showings including Telluride and London. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 New York Film Festival. US theatrical release date 20 Nov. 2015; UK, 27 Nov., France, 13 Jan. 2016. Weinstein Company release.

[Chris Knipp]

JAMES SOLOMAN: THE WITNESS (2015)


KITTY GENOVESE

Spotlight on Documentary

Obsessive investigation of a sister's death falls short of a sense of closure

Bill, younger brother of Kitty Genovese, a favorite of hers and sixteen when she died, is filmed in this documentary by writer-producer James Solomon, who covers Bill's tireless effort fifty years later to investigate the famous case of his sister's murder. On 13 March 1964 in Kew Gardens, Queens, below the Mowbray apartments, Kitty was robbed, raped, and stabbed to death with many watching and doing nothing, so a New York Times story said. The case became universal symbol of modern urban anomie, human coldness and indifference. Bill investigates this legend and exhaustively ferrets out details about the crime and Kitty herself in search of closure that proves elusive.

Solomon stays out of the picture, with Bill Genovese the narrator and protagonist, missing both legs (lost as a Marine in Vietnam) but vigorously active, contacting sources and visiting them. Bill's first question is whether the Times story was true. Were there really 38 witnesses who did nothing? Yes and no, and maybe not. It is not clear that it happened that way. Very few saw anything, others only heard, and some may not have understood what the sounds meant. Some apparently did do something, called the police, more than one, at least according to one interviewed witness. But if so, why was she not saved? The auditory witnesses seem to ahve been confused by the the fact that the perpetrator, Winston Moseley, fled the scene for twenty minutes or so and then returned to finish off his victim.

A surprise discovery is that Kitty did not die alone: a woman friend (heard from near the end) rushed down to her and Kitty died in her arms. There was nothing of this in news stories or police reports.

Next comes the investigation of Kitty herself. Her death had clouded a sense of her life. It's said that she was not a barmaid as first reported, but a bar manager. She sometimes handled illegal betting in the bar, and it turns out the photo shown above was a police mug shot from a time when she was arrested for this activity. She was smart, a maverick who often cut class in high school, yet popular and a leader of the pack. We see numerous film clips of her, a lean, lively life of the party who drove a red FIAT. Bright though she was she chose not to go to college. When the family moved to Connecticut to be in a safer place she chose to stay in NYC. Perhaps an explanation is that -- a surprise to Bill Genovese, perhaps to all her family -- it turns out that though briefly married, Kitty was a lesbian. Her supposed roommate in the Mowbray apartment was her lover (also heard from). Her sexuality may have had much to do with her choosing to remain in the freer atmosphere of the big city where she could live with her girlfriend.

Later Bill/Solomon delve deeply into press coverage as well as later TV reexaminations of the murder case, revealing that author of the original front page Times story consciously overstated the indifference of witnesses to make a better story. The film is excellent in the thoroughness of its investigation of this, with numerous interviews, including one with the late Mike Wallace.

Finally we learn about Winston Moseley, the diminutive light-skinned black man who confessed to this and another murder, and also later escaped from prison, committed more crimes, and was caught. He was bright, with an IQ of 130, and eventually got a correspondence degree in sociology. Prosecutors and lawmen are interviewed. The word for Moseley's personality is "ice." He is clearly a sociopath who might, if he'd remained at large, have turned into a serial killer. Apart from his escape he has remained in prison for fifty years and every parole application has been denied. Bill meets with one of his sons, a man of the cloth, in compensation, perhaps, who nonetheless appears to believe false justifications for his father's crime. The rapist-murderer himself unfortunately refuses to meet with Bill. But later he sends him a preposterous letter inventing a story according to which a mafia gangster perpetrated the crime in his presence. It's a sad way for things to end, with lying and delusion, and at this point I began to wonder if The Witness provides enlightenment or only confusion.

All this aside, the Kitty Genovese story remains a tenacious modern myth of human indifference, even if it's a distortion of the facts it was originally based on. James Solomon and Bill Genovese's film represents an impressively thorough investigation. Alas, it does not leave one feeling enlightened about the crime or the legend it credated. There are many versions of the Kitty Genovese story in fiction, film and TV, and some are alluded to in this film. One I recently reviewed was Lucas Belvaux's 2012 feature film 38 Témoins ("38 Witnesses"), from a French novel, starring Yvan Attal, and focused on the subsequent tormenting sense of guilt felt by one of the witnesses to a parallel scene of murder and indifference set in Le Havre. This film is not satisfying either, but it represents an important topic that The Witness, despite its title, doesn't provide access to: the guilt the witnesses may have felt in Kew Gardens when they learned a horrible crime had happened that they might have stopped.

Solomon's film is an interesting portrait of a family member's tireless investigation of his sister's legendary death. At one point I was thinking it might turn out to be one of the best documentaries of the year, perhaps even comparable to Nathaniel Kahn's extraordinary investigation of his father, the great architect but very flawed father Louis Kahn in the 2003 film My Architect. But The Witness, though about a worthy topic, leaves us, like Bill Genovese, without ultimate closure. Its over-thoroughness becomes under-revealing. It lacks My Architect's emotional rewards and beautiful shape. The investigation itself is at fault, but also the vagueness of Solomon's role.

The Witness, 96 mins., debuted at the 2015 New York Film Festival (6 Oct.) as part of the sidebar Spotlight on Documentary series. A Submarine release. It is to open in NYC 3 June 2016. At Roxie Center, San Francisco 29 July 2016.

[Chris Knipp]

LAURIE ANDERSON: HEART OF A DOG (2015)


LOLABELLE IN HEART OF A DOG

Special Events

A good-natured mélange of thoughts, anecdotes and whimsy

Dogs have clearly become an avant-gardist’s best friend. First Jean-Luc Godard delivered a funny 3D valentine to a pooch named Roxy Mieville in Goodbye to Language, and now the New York-based musician/performance artist Laurie Anderson has woven a tide of personal stories, insights and visual-musical riffs into a more accessible but no less singular consideration of the species in Heart of a Dog. While this alternately goofy, serious, lyrical and beguiling cine-essay serves primarily as a loving tribute to the memory of Anderson’s rat terrier, Lolabelle, its roving, free-associative structure brings together all manner of richly eccentric musings on the evasions of memory, the limitations of language and storytelling, the strangeness of life in a post-9/11 surveillance state, and the difficulty and necessity of coming to terms with death.--Justin Chang, Variety

I can't add much to what Justin Chang said about this genial, meandering film. It partakes of the spirit of Laurie Anderson's performances that go back to the early Seventies. This one is dedicated to the memory of her husband Lou Reed who died in October 2013 at the age of 71 -- though there is not much of or about Lou Reed in Heart of a Dog. Most of this film is in the first person, and dominated by Anderson's voice, which almost never lets up. An interlude of silence, a grove of winter trees with light snow falling, is one of the most memorable parts of the film.

From her photos and citations of neighbors we learn Anderson lived on West Eleventh Street, in the same block as Julian Schnabel's pink "Palazzo del Popolo" -- within breathing distance of the World Trade Center and, she tells, confronted with a roadway and land along the West River near her street covered with white dust. The two overriding themes of Heart of a Dog are 9/11 (and its aftermath) and her dog, with some philosophizing and several digressions to talk about major events in her early life. Notable among these is a long period spent in hospital with a broken back after jumping off a diving board and hitting the pool's cement edge, and the time when when she took two little brothers out on a lake in winter and they fell through the ice and she saved them.

Lolabelle, Laurie's rat terrier, turns out, pushed by the artist-filmmaker's whimsy, to have surprising talents. Though she may have been pushed to reveal them, the dog learns to "make art" and "play" the piano. Seeking to escape 9/11 paranoia, Anderson took Lolabella on a trip to Northern California. She tells us rat terriers are said to be capable of mastering 500 words, and she aimed to discover "which words they were." But this project she abandoned in favor of simply enjoying the beauties of the hills and coast.

The music is powerful, though for complexity and richness of images Godard's Goodbye to Language has the edge. Anderson's film is "more accessible" but also less complex, less intellectually challenging. Her observations, sometimes relying on her Buddhist teacher, are on the obvious slide. There is a reminiscence of the unique, short-lived artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who was a friend, and died at only 35. She tells how he invited his friends to the hospital in his last days and read to them. This is a good-natured work that it's impossible to dislike.

Heart of a Dog, 75 mins., debuted at Telluride. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 New York Film Festival where it was presented as a Special Event. Anderson designed this year's New York Film Festival poster. A US theatrical release of the film begins in NYC 19 Oct. 2015 (Film Forum).

[Chris Knipp]

REBECCA MILER: MAGGIE'S PLAN (2015)


GRETA GERWIG AND ETHAN HAWKE IN MAGGIE'S PLAN

The independent doormat

Rebecca Miller's sort-of rom-com Maggie's Plan is a bit too into itself and its Manhattan settings, but it has some new things to offer. Miller's turning from drama to comedy. "Vikings" star and former Calvin Klein underwear god Travis Fimmel as a pickle entrepreneur sperm donor (to Grata Gerwig's character). Tragic drama queen Julianne Moore showing how ridiculous and funny she can be as a Danish professor married to Ethan Hawke. (She could as well be Icelandic, with her weird accent and her outfits that might have be on loan from Björk, but that's the point: she's from outer space.) Ethan Hawke for the first time working with a woman director -- and with three women, essentially, since Maggie's Plan is dominated by Georgette (Moore) and Maggie (Gerwig), whom his character, John, gets tossed back and forth between.

The tossing is what bothers me, because Maggie's Plan -- which is as intentionally messy in plot as Maggie herself, a self-reliant, centered young woman with a Quaker background, is organized -- does what too many American rom-coms do today. It loses all sense of narrative structure. And then again, that it winds up where it started out is quite intentional too.

The premise is simple and clear enough. Maggie, wanting to have a child but aware she can't seem to stay with one man more than six months (which, by the way, doesn't quite fit the stable, organized Quaker), looks for a sperm donor (the long-bearded Fimmel). And it's good she calls on a Viking, because all this happens in New York in wintertime -- with a side trip to Quebec for an academic conference. But then she meets John in Washington Square and winds up agreeing to read the manuscript of his novel. She is an administrator at the New School where he is a hottie new teacher. And one thing leads to another, with John's iffy marriage to Georgette derailed by his love affair with Maggie, who falls in love with him as well.

Georgette is an absurdly self-centered academic star herself. The arcane academic specialties of this couple are tossed out for laughs, but they went over my head. ( Something about anthorpology and commodities, for John.) John and Georgette have a couple of noisy, bratty little darlings and an older, grown-up girl who can talk. Wallace Shawn has a one-line appearance, and Bill Hader, who's in touch with his feminine side and delivers lines well, is that rom-com staple, Maggie's longtime pal, with advice.

Jump ahead three years. John and Maggie are married and have their own little girl (what happened to the pickle entrepreneur's Viking's sperm? It got dumped for an early meeting with John). Maggie is so good at organizing things and caring for the three kids, both Georgette and John can pursue their academic work and John can continue with his novel -- except that the novel isn't getting anywhere. And life with Maggie is too perfect. Maggie realizes that John needed to deal with the craziness and self-absorption of Georgette. It kept him from being too absorbed in his work or his novel. We can't really believe in the brilliance of Georgette (only her oddity) or of John, they're just givens. John doesn't sound bright to me. He uses "fuck" a lot, like any ordinary dude.

So Maggie's Plan, the main one, is to get John back with Georgette. And so it turns out that the independent young woman played by Gerwig here is the perfect doormat. As the only stable, responsible partner, that's the role she winds up playing.

I did not find any of this believable, or engaging. Julianne Moore is droll, and Greta Gerwig is, as usual, smooth and natural. Ethan Hawke is glib, but one feels no emotion. I thought of that famous early scene for Hawke in Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams struggles to make his young preppie character learn to emote. It seems he has lost the shyness of that young Hawke but still can't emote. Well over half the movie is devoted to talking about getting Georgette and John back together again. It gets beyond tiresome. But the Lower Manhattan atmosphere and in-jokey stuff about academe make this an original treatment of the kind of confusion of relationships that might be dealt with in a more conventional, less into-itself comedy, like the current Sleeping with Other People. This may be, as they're saying, Rebecca Miller's most successful, widely appealing film, but I liked her less successful ones. This is based on an unpublished novel. Hmmm. . .

Maggie's Plan a longish 96 mins., debuted at Toronto, where Miller apologized for its appearing without a distributor (but isn't that what festivals are for, to find them?). It was also part of the 2015 New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review. The inclusion in the NYFF Main Slate is explicable given its family resemblance to Noah Baumbach's work and inclusion of Baumbach's girlfriend, together with lots of very natural photography of New York whose realistic color contrasted, not unappealingly, with the gloriously dreamlike Ed Lachman Gotham images of another, much better NYFF 2015 film, Todd Haynes's Carol. Maggie has been picked up by Sony Pictures Classics.

(Release date 20 May 2016. Metacritic rating a fawning, deluded 75%.)