Barbie faces an existential crisis -- really

 

     Imagine a world in which Barbie (yes, that Barbie) suddenly begins thinking about death. What if dark thoughts intrude on Barbie’s otherwise bright and shining life?

     But wait. You don't have to imagine such a scenario. Director Greta Gerwig has done it for you.

     Part satire, part pop-cultural celebration, and part cheering session for feminist assertion, Gerwig's Barbie tries to accomplish a neat trick -- at least as far as its audience is concerned. 

    The movie attempts to please the adoring legions of girls who grew up playing with Barbies while also taking a bite (a soft one to be sure) from a satirical apple.

      Whatever it's about, Barbie derives much of its comic kick from the pink-hued work of production designer Sarah Greenwood and costume designer Jacqueline Durran. They create Barbieland, an aggressively happy place that might be the best thing the movie has to offer.

      Two star turns help keep the movie spinning. Margot Robbie makes a smiling Barbie whose perfect life unravels when she begins having unwanted thoughts and (oh, the horror!) her beautifully arched feet turn flat.

      Working a high-beam smile and allowing an occasional lonely teardrop to roll down her face, Robbie slips into full Barbie mode. 

    Ryan Gosling plays Ken, the male doll who, at the outset, lives only to bask in the warmth of Barbie's gaze, a role that’s bound to breed discontent.

    Written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, the story eventually takes Barbie to the real world of Los Angeles where she tries to find the girl whose thoughts plunged her into existential crisis. There’s evidently an emotional link between the Barbies and the girls who play with them.

    Ken tags along with Barbie but eventually returns to Barbieland, where he tries to establish his stilted idea of patriarchal government, ousting Barbie president Isa Rae and engaging in parodic muscle flexing. He becomes the ultimate poseur. 

      Barbie remains in LA for a while, eventually meeting and fleeing from Mattel executives -- led by Will Ferrell -- who want to put her back into a box -- literally.

       Hey, if you’re looking for subtlety, you’re in the wrong place.

       When a fleeing Barbie finally returns to Barbieland, she's accompanied by humans. America Ferrera plays a former Barbie enthusiast, a Mattel employee who travels to Barbieland with her skeptical teenage daughter (Ariana Greenblatt). 

      Robie's Barbie describes herself as Stereotypical Barbie, which suggests she's not alone. Barbieland is home to all manner of Barbies, some representing various stages of the doll's evolution.

         Ken isn't alone either. A multitude of Kens inhabit Barbieland.

         Kate McKinnon plays Weird Barbie, an exile in Barbieland who fell out of favor when someone played too hard with her. 

         Gerwig works overtime to incorporate meaning into this pink bauble of a movie. Does Barbie inspire girls to be more than smiling dolls?  Is she a product of the male quest for dominance, an unattainable role model to which no girl can measure up? Can the human world coexist with heavily marketed merchandise? 

         In some ways, Barbie is nothing more than a dressed-up sketch that wants to have it both ways, treating Barbie as a pop-cultural heroine and as a satirical object in a story that argues that young women must create identities free of commercial and social influences. 

         Another way to pose the question: To be plastic or not to be plastic?

         Gerwig finds enough laughs to keep anyone from trying to plumb any depths or wonder whether the plot makes any sense at all. 

       Enough. You've probably read that Barbie ends with a one-liner that gives the film its sharpest kick. It does.

       

       

         

        

 

'White Noise' never seems to find its footing

   In adapting Don DeLillo's 1985 novel, White Noise, for the screen, director Noah Baumbach has made a wildly uneven movie that soars and sinks until it arrives at a brilliant end-credit musical number set to LCD Soundsystem's New Body Rhumba. 

      Some of White Noise struck me as abrasively funny, although it's easy to make fun of academic pretension, one of the movie's early preoccupations. Otherwise, Baumbach sends his movie here, there, and everywhere, spewing cleverness but never finding its footing. 

      Looking as if he hasn't made a trip to the gym in months, a pot-bellied Adam Driver plays Jack Gladney, a college professor specializing in Hitler studies, a field he pioneered. 

    Jack's wife Babette (Greta Gerwig)  works with the elderly and is addicted to pills known as Dylar. (What these pills do remains a mystery until near the movie’s end.)

   A fourth marriage for both Jack and Babette, the couple lives in a college town with the kids from their combined households, four in all.

   Don Cheadle turns up as Murray, one of Jack's colleagues, a professor who lectures on pop culture. Murray hopes to do for Elvis what Jack has done for Hitler, turn the King into an academic rage.

   At one point, Jack and Murray give dueling lectures that Jack treats as a clash of egos and which Baumbach deftly stages with each professor trying to out-dramatize the other.

    Baumbach soon introduces a disaster-movie element that’s foreshowed by an early-picture lecture Murray gives on the deeper meaning of car crashes in movies.

     When a truck and a train collide, the little college town that Jack and Babette call home is threatened by an "airborne toxic event." Toxic clouds pollute the air.

     Fearing contamination and heeding an evacuation order, the family piles into a station wagon and flees the advancing cloud. The movie suddenly becomes a cockeyed disaster pic full of roads glutted with traffic, impromptu shelters, and escalating fear.

    Baumbach keeps many of DeLillo's ironic jokes. Jack, for example, bills himself as an expert on Hitler but he doesn't speak German. Supermarkets become meccas of personal fulfillment. Consumerism attains the status of a new religion.

     All of this in the service of obliterating any consciousness of mortality in a culture that can't bear to face the prospect of death, a fear that haunts both Jack and Babette.

     A late picture development brings Jack face-to-face with unpleasant truths, including a confession of infidelity by Babette that leads to ... oh well ... it doesn't exactly matter because it feels as if Baumbach has deposited us in another movie, one in which Jack tries to unravel the mysteries of Dylar.

   Baumbach sets the story in the 1980s, just as DeLillo did. That means White Noise can feel dated. Amusing in spurts and obviously ambitious, White Noise never becomes a self-sufficient romp through a fractured culture.

    Instead, Baumbach's White Noise feels like a collection of the accumulated absurdities that once fired DeLillo’s imagination in a novel that many considered unfilmable. Pehraps they were right. Some things should be left on the page.

A giddy (maybe too much so) ‘Little Women’

A great cast elevates Greta Gerwig's helping of Louisa May Alcott's oft-told story.

Greta Gerwig has directed the seventh version of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women to reach the big screen. First published in 1868, Alcott's novel has passed through so many generations that I remember my mother mentioning it to a female cousin of mine who's now in her 80s.

As a member of the generation that grew up watching black-and-white movies on TV, I’ve seen director George Cukor's 1933 version, which starred Katharine Hepburn as Jo March. As a reviewer, I admired the 1994 version in which Winona Ryder portrayed Jo under Gillian Armstrong's direction.

So much for my Little Women bona fides.

In Gerwig’s version, we meet the sisters of the title after they’ve already become adults. Putting chronological storytelling aside, Gerwig moves the narrative backward and forward in ways that struck me as initially confusing but probably will present less of a problem for Little Women devotees who don't need a scorecard to keep up with the characters.

Gerwig and editor Nick Houy proceed at the kind of frantic pace that you might expect from someone who was trying to stay one step ahead of a tax collector. This distractingly giddy tone is augmented by Alexander Desplat’s score, which — truth be told — sometimes seems intent on becoming as prominent as one of the characters.

Eventually, the story begins to cohere, thanks in no small part to the fine cast that Gerwig has assembled.

Saoirse Ronan lands the role of Jo and brings every bit of ambition and hurt to a character who has become a women’s lit staple.

Early on, Jo -- who aspires to be a writer -- brings a story to a publisher (Tracy Letts). Although Letts' character accepts the work, the movie's main point is made: Women should secure their future by marrying. The world doesn't have much use for strong, independent-minded women who want to forge their own way.

As Letts' character puts it, a woman's story either should end in marriage or death.

Ronan captures Jo’s growing determination — not to mention her resistance to the advances of the young man who loves her (Timothee Chalamet's Theodore Laurence). The movie includes one of the great scenes of rejection when Jo tells Theodore that they'd make a terrible match. This time, it's the guy who's crushed.

Florence Pugh, seen earlier this year in Midsommar, gives the movie’s most surprising performance as Amy, the sister who paints and connives and who, of course, ultimately loves Jo and all her sisters. Relationships strain but the bonds of sisterhood prevail.

Neither Ronan nor Pugh imprisons her performance in period trappings. Both seem as if they exist both and in the present and in the 19th Century; the story takes place during the Civil War and is set in motion by an absentee father. Mr. March (Bob Odenkirk in a piece of unexpected casting) has gone off to be a chaplain to the Union's troops, leaving the sisters and their mother (an excellent Laura Dern) to keep the home fires burning in Concord, MA.

Emma Watson plays Meg, the sister who seems to have totally adjusted to the idea of home and hearth. Jo pushes Meg to assert herself as an actress but Meg insists that she finds her fulfillment in domesticity.

Sister Beth (Eliza Scanlen) plays piano and is assigned the thankless task of providing the movie's great tragedy when she contracts scarlet fever.

Early on, there's a suggestion that Jo might find happiness with Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel), a French professor of languages, but she pushes him aside when he insults her writing.

Chris Cooper has a nice turn as Mr. Laurence, grandfather to Chalamet's Theodore, who everyone calls "Laurie." And Meryl Streep turns up as Aunt March, a woman who sometimes plays the role of family scold but who takes Amy to France for painting, culture, and grooming for marriage.

At times, Gerwig puts speeches about female assertion into the mouths of the characters, making points that already have been dramatized. It's a form of underling that the movie didn't need and which seems like an unnecessary bow to contemporary gender demands.

None of this is to say that the period isn't well-represented. Cinematographer Yorik Le Saux, production designer Jess Gonchar and costume designer Jacqueline Durran all should be credited for first-rate work.

Like so many before her, Gerwig clearly loves the material. Many will love the movie back. Forgive me for being someone who would have liked it more had Gerwig, especially in the early going, not seemed to be straining to keep the movie lively.

Wes Anderson's distinctive 'Isle of Dogs'

Stop-action animation, a great voice cast, and strangely insular atmospherics make the director's latest appealing.

I’m not a total fan of Wes Anderson, the director whose work includes The Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Moonrise Kingdom and The Darjeeling Express). But there’s no arguing that Anderson is one of the few directors working today who follows his imagination wherever it leads him. To enjoy his movies, you must accept his apparent unwillingness to curb his idiosyncrasies or to tailor his work to popular expectation. You must accept -- and perhaps even welcome -- what feels like the willed insularity of Anderson's world.

In Isle of Dogs — Anderson’s latest — the director employs stop-action animation to create a story in which a Japanese mayor banishes all the dogs in his city to an island where the city dumps its trash.

Every dog lover will recognize this as a horrible situation and Anderson doesn’t shrink from the inherent sadness of a society so cruel that it condemns a species that has done nothing to deserve being ostracized.

The city's authoritarian Mayor Kobayashi (voice by Kunichi Nomura) -- a lover of cats -- takes a sadistic approach to an epidemic of dog flu that turns once faithful companions into health hazards. Totally committed to his own power, Kobayashi refuses to change his mind even when a researcher develops a serum that will cure every flu-carrying pooch.

Although it feels all of a piece, Isle of Dogs is a linguistic mash-up. The abandoned dogs speak English and the Japanese characters speak Japanese (no subtitles). There's also an American exchange student who, of course, speaks English. A reporter for a high school newspaper, she crusades to topple Kobayashi's rule.

The animation is impeccable and creative — from doggie expressions to cityscapes to the forlorn trash heaps where the abandoned dogs roam. You'll also find outstanding voice work from Edward Norton, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray, Greta Gerwig and more.

Cranston’s mangy Chief may be the most distinctive of the dogs. A stray who doesn’t believe in trying to please humans, Chief warns others that he's not afraid to bite.

Sometimes when I watch an animated movie I can’t help trying to visualize the human actor behind the animated character.
Cranston’s voice is unmistakable, but — for the most part — I forgot about who might be doing the voice work and immersed myself in the visual environment Anderson and his team so ably create.

Anderson bows to Japanese film culture — often in humorous ways. At one point, for example, he employs a bit of the score from Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai as a wry commentary on the action.

I wouldn't call Isle of Dogs a kids' movie, although it centers on 12-year-old Atari (Koyu Rankin), a boy who steals a small plane, crashes on Trash Island and winds up helping to rebuild a bridge between dogs and humans.

One question seems unavoidable: Does Anderson’s movie have a seriously deep meaning? Is it an allegory or simply another display of Anderson's eccentricity?

I’m not sure where I stand on the question, an uncertainty about Anderson's work that has bothered me before. But I also find his artistic expressions personal and intriguing, full of small touches that can be as pleasing as the film’s overall design.

Toward the end of the movie, a dog and his new family are served heaping bowls of red meat, something of an apology from the previously abusive humans. Each puppy gets the same food -- only in tiny bowls. I’m not entirely sure why this detail made me smile. Perhaps because it’s emblematic of Anderson's approach, placing irresistible bits of minutiae against backdrops that seem to have been created with something that might be called "cockeyed control."

A coming-of-age movie with smarts

Greta Gerwig makes her directorial debut with the perceptive Lady Bird.

Lady Bird was so rapturously received on the fall festival circuit that when I finally saw this enjoyable coming-of-age movie, I was slightly taken aback by a level of critical enthusiasm that, for me at least, seemed excessive. I'll put some emphasis on the word "slightly" because I did find Lady Bird entertaining and worthy, a smart movie that picks its way through a well-worn genre without engendering any of the contempt usually bred by familiarity. That's because the movie's writer/director Greta Gerwig has a singular sensibility and because Gerwig, who does not appear in the movie, seems to be mining her own adolescent memories.

I don't know how much Lady Bird adheres to Gerwig's life, but the movie has been made with the kind of affectionate observation that suggests a strong connection between this fictional account and the reality of Gerwig's teen years.

To fully appreciate what Gerwig has accomplished, it's necessary to understand what she hasn't done. She introduces but doesn't overplay the story of a teenager who suddenly becomes friends with an attractive, popular girl and, as a result, ignores her best friend, someone who'll never be Homecoming Queen.

She includes a scene in which the movie's main character -- played by the emotionally supple Saoirse Ronan -- loses her virginity and winds up disappointed, a familiar teen-movie ploy but one that's freshened by Gerwig's idiosyncratic take on the collision between romantic expectation and reality. There's even a prom, but that, too, has its own off-kilter charms.

Although it doesn't always occupy center stage, the key relationship in Lady Bird revolves around Ronan's character and her mother, a psychiatric nurse played by Laurie Metcalf. The central issue in that relationship involves a mother's accusatory view of her daughter's aspirations, a sense that Ronan's Lady Bird (the name the character has chosen for herself) might be dreaming too big and, thus, heading for inevitable disappointment.

For her part, Lady Bird wants to escape what she views as the stultifying confines of Sacramento to attend college in the sophisticated East. Her mother wants her to stay closer to home, a preference that's not only geographical but metaphorical. Mom, who lives a conventional life with her newly unemployed husband (a fine Tracy Letts), may be envious of her daughter's desire to escape the weight of obligation.

The fact that Lady Bird -- a.k.a. Christine McPherson -- attends a Catholic high school adds more flavor. Happily, Gerwig resists caricature, presenting the school's faculty with sympathetic humor. Sister Sarah Joan (an amiable Lois Smith) displays unexpected humor. Father Leviatch (Stephen Henderson) runs the drama club but is subject to bouts of depression. When Father Leviatch takes a leave of absence, the junior varsity football coach (Bob Stephenson) substitutes, preparing the cast for a production of The Tempest as if he were giving a half-time pep talk to a roomful of jocks.

One of the movie's best scenes occurs when Lady Bird meets with Sister Sarah Joan to discuss her college essay. Sister Sarah observes that Lady Bird has written affectionately about Sacramento, the city she purportedly loathes. Lady Bird says that she guesses that she pays attention, and Sister Sarah comments that paying attention qualifies as a form of love.

The boys in Lady Bird's life become part of her growing-up process. Lucas Hedges, familiar from Manchester by the Sea, portrays Danny, a star of high school musicals. He becomes Lady Bird's first boyfriend, but the relationship takes a turn Lady Bird fails to anticipate.

Lady Bird later develops a relationship with Kyle (Timothee Chalamet), a teenager who seems to have watched too many James Dean movies, internalizing an alienated pose.

Nice work from Odeya Rush as a Jenna, the unbearably popular girl, and from Beanie Feldstein as Julie, Lady Bird's BFF and the total opposite of Rush's Jenna.

Gerwig, familiar as an actress from movies such as Francis Ha, has made her directorial debut with an easy touch that results in a crowd-pleasing entertainment. The best compliment I can give Lady Bird is to insist that it’s a movie about a particular teenager rather than another entry in Hollywood's endless stream of generic and often dim-witted coming-of-age movies.

Happily engaging and marked by Ronan's wit and vulnerability, Lady Bird introduces us to a young woman who's taking small and large steps on one of life's more exciting journeys: discovering herself.

A look at women of the last century

Annette Bening occupies the center of a rich, anecdotal movie.

The house in Santa Barbara, Ca., constantly is being renovated. Its owner, a 55-year-old woman with a teen-age son, rents out rooms. The tenants include a mechanic who's a little long in the tooth to be called a hippie, a young woman recovering from cervical cancer, and a teen-age girl who occasionally slips into the house to sleep with the owner's son. By this I mean, she actually sleeps with the owner's son, forcing the boy to subdue his raging hormones as she looks for a safe place from her sometimes promiscuous exploits.

If you were around during the 70s, this all may have a vaguely familiar ring -- loosey-goosey social arrangements that approximate the intricacies of family: a single parent who often find herself at a loss when it comes to child rearing, sexual exploration and an overall sense of being too harried to search for deeper meaning.

Dad? He's not in the picture, having left for New York to start a new life.

That's the environment that director Mike Mills creates for 20th Century Women, a movie that manages to create a feeling for how life felt in 1979.

Normally, that might seem too narrow a gauge to hold our interest, but Mills has made a movie dominated by the shambling flow of the jangled lives of the women who populate it.

The result is rich, funny and warm -- although about three-quarters of the way through you may find yourself wondering whether Mills will be able to bring all these ingredients to some sort of a boil.

If that never happens, there are plenty of compensatory moments along the way: When the car of the owner of the house catches fire in a parking lot, she responds by inviting the firemen to dinner. And when her son points out that this is not exactly a normal response, she can't understand why her behavior might be considered odd.

Annette Bening gives the movie's anchor performance as Dorothea, a cigarette-smoking mother who winds up parenting a teen-age son (Lucas Jade Zumann) rather late in life. Unsure how to handle the young man, Dorothea seeks help from her cancer-conquering tenant (Greta Gerwig) and from Julie (Elle Fanning), the girl who becomes a near-constant visitor.

Supposedly based on Mills's own upbringing, 20th Century Women benefits from the actresses who grace it. Playing an aspiring photographer, Gerwig brings a mixture of confusion and vivaciousness to the movie, and Fanning perfectly captures the incipient world-weariness of a young woman whose sexual behavior has out-paced her emotional ability to deal with it. Fanning's character is a mass of contradictions; she's exploring her womanhood before even leaving the backpack stage.

Needless to say Dorothea's experiment doesn't entirely work. After Jamie goes clubbing with Gerwig's character, Dorothea wistfully muses that she'll never see that side of her son, a teen-ager trying to negotiate a separate social world for himself.

It's possible that the other actresses were inspired by the gifted Bening, whose Dorothea presides over the house, tries to maintain her composure and allow her son a degree of freedom he hasn't really sought.

In his best role in a long time, Billy Crudup plays a mechanic, the man in the house who tires to keep his poise. He, too, seems to be stuck in an emotional limbo.

Finding his way proves difficult for young Jamie, whose life is guided by three formidable but sometimes floundering women. We're told the story through Jamie's eyes.

Enjoyable in pieces -- and I don't mean that as a slam -- 20th Century Women makes a simple request: It asks us to spend some time with these appealing characters. They engage us in a series of gestures and responses that, like life itself, can charm, amuse and confound.

A dachshund and people in pain

Todd Solondz's Wiener-Dog contains few surprises for the director's fans.

I've never been particularly enamored of director Todd Solondz's vision of a suburban America dominated by cruelty, isolation and sometimes criminality. And with Solondz's Wiener-Dog, a movie named for the main character of his 1995 breakthrough, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Solondz's worldview seems no more appealing.

Wiener-Dog isn't one evolving movie, but four vignettes united by the presence of a dachshund in each one of its unhappy tales, as well as by a pervasive sadness that runs against the tide of Solondz's attempts at satirical humor.

One of the characters in Wiener-Dog is a failed screenwriter named Schmerz, a not-so-subtle reference to the Yiddish and German words for pain. Deeply felt emotional pain provides the fuel that keeps Wiener-Dog's engine sputtering.

In the first episode, an insensitive father (Tracy Letts) brings Wiener-Dog home for his son, a kid who has battled cancer. The boy's mother (Julie Delpy) doesn't want a dog in the house, but acquiesces when the father insists.

The emotion of the piece centers on the boy (Keaton Nigel Cooke), a cute kid whose every line of dialogue sounds like the plaintive cry of an innocent who's about to be trampled. The boy, I suppose, embodies the movie's suffering soul.

Despite his generous gesture toward the boy, the father is brusk and insensitive; the episode ends cruelly when Wiener-Dog is taken to a veterinarian to be euthanized.

Here is Solondz in brief: The insensitivity of parents toward both boy and animal stands as a form of contemptible self-absorption.

In the next episode, the character played by Heather Matarazzo in Solondz's first movie, re-emerges as an adult, this time played by Greta Gerwig.

Gerwig's character winds up taking a trip with a former high school classmate played by Kieran Culkin, a drug-dealing young man who visits his brother, who has Down Syndrome and is married to a woman with Down Syndrome. This time, Wiener-Dog's name has been changed to Doody.

The movie includes a faux intermission in which Solondz's grim misanthropy contrasts with an upbeat presentation reminiscent of the interludes once found in bygone drive-in theaters.

The intermission gives way to episode three, which revolves the aforementioned Schmerz (Danny DeVito), a sad sack of a man who's teaching screenwriting at a college and who is regarded as useless and unhelpful by most of his students. The hapless dachshund becomes part of Schmerz's desperate revenge plot.

By the last episode, the dog's name has changed to Cancer, a pretty good indication that things will continue to go badly. Ellen Burstyn plays Cancer's owner, a sour woman who's visited by her granddaughter (Zosia Mamet). The granddaughter wants money to help support her hostile artist boyfriend (Michael Shaw).

Animal lovers, especially dog lovers, will recoil at the way Solondz brings his not-so-shaggy dog story to its conclusion.

What troubles me about Wiener-Dog has less to with its cruelty -- perhaps not as extreme as what we saw in movies such as Happiness (1998) -- but with its pro forma rendering of Solondz's mostly cheerless reality.

Wiener-Dog leads Solondz into a creative cul-de-sac in which neither real drama nor comedy can flourish. It felt to me that in each of these stories, only one outcome was possible: More misery for both the dachshund and its temporary owners.

More tales from New York City

Rebecca Miller's Maggie's Plan finds amusement in its characters' pretensions.

Watching writer/director Rebecca Miller's Maggie's Plan, I wondered whether something magical hadn'toccurred. Had Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach merged into an entirely new third person?

You all know Allen, and are familiar with his New York state of mind. The Baumbach connection requires only a little more explanation. Baumbach (Frances Ha and Mistress America) has worked with Greta Gerwig on several films, and Gerwig plays a pivotal role in Maggie's Plan, a New York-based movie in which the dialogue sometimes sounds as if it's standing on Allen's shoulders.

But Miller has her own view, one that sees characters as trapped by their pretensions and by relationships that are swamped by ego and need. As such, Maggie's Plan is a mostly pleasing seriocomic take on contemporary relationships.

Gerwig portrays Maggie, a young woman who has created one of those fuzzy, new-economy livelihoods: She tries to link artists with the commercial world.

Though single, Maggie wants a child. She arranges to acquire the seed of a sperm donor, a fellow named Guy (Travis Fimmel) who's carving out a career as a Brooklyn pickle maker. The Bavarian, he says, qualifies as one of his best.

Maggie's best pals (Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph) are a cynical couple who already have a child and seem immune to the massive child-centeredness of so many new parents.

Of course, Maggie's path to motherhood can't be simple. Just before she begins negotiating the tricky procedure of self-impregnation, she meets John (Ethan Hawke), a "ficto-anthropology" professor who's working on a novel.

John has needs that aren't being satisfied by his wife (Julianne Moore), a Columbia professor with a major academic career. He also has two kids.

John asks Maggie to read the first chapter of his novel. She does. Because she seems to understand his authorial intentions, he falls for her. She falls for him, probably because she's buoyed by his reliance on her. She's needed.

Miller skips John's break-up, and moves ahead several years. Now married, John and Maggie have a daughter of their own, and Maggie often finds herself caring for John's kids from his previous marriage.

Nothing like marriage, kids and family entanglements to take the bloom off the romantic rose.

Maggie begins to see that she has turned herself into a capable (her word) helpmate who nurtures John's ego and tends to his domestic needs.

The rest of the plot should be discovered in a theater, but know that it's not the story that makes Maggie's Plan appealing. Rather, the actors and a collection of amusing small moments create a welcome sense that Maggie's Plan is as much a comedy of manners as a rom-com that revolves around another indeterminate Millennial woman.

Gerwig plays Maggie as an apparently guileless woman who might be the most unprovocative dresser (long skirts or dresses, sweaters and loafers) to appear in a movie for some time. Maggie looks like a woman who's doing a Diane Keaton impersonation, but can't get it right.

As an insecure academic with literary aspirations, Hawke is funny and credible. Hawke's John never seems to know where he's going, unless its on a journey into his own head.

But it falls to Moore to deliver a comic masterpiece of a performance as Georgette, a Danish woman with a bizarre European accent and a personality composed of acute angles. Massively stilted, Georgette probably sounds like she's giving a lecture even when she's brushing her teeth.

Miller explores what it's like to fall in and out love in what many aptly have described as a mash-up of stylistic contexts: from screwball comedy to personal drama.

Whatever it is, Maggie's Plan shows us something about the way the omelettes of contemporary lives are made -- by, as the saying goes, breaking lots of eggs.

In Miller's case, many of those eggs are cracked directly over the characters' heads.

A major helping of Greta Gerwig

Mistress America , a movie of intermittent amusements.

In Mistress America, Greta Gerwig draws on all her power to play a scattered, funny and wildly ambitious New Yorker. As a young woman seeking a place for herself in a trend-crazed world, Gerwig's Brooke creates a tornadic whirl around everything she does.

Spend five minutes with Brooke, and she'll ramble on about possible TV shows she wants to produce (a reality show called Mistress America being one of them), new apps she plans to invent and scads of other imagined endeavors that she hopes will secure her niche in a fluid economy.

Here's the thing, though: We get Brooke early, and there's not much left for us to learn about her in this Noah Baumbach-directed comedy. Baumbach, you'll recall, previously worked with Gerwig on Frances Ha.

Although she's the movie's dominant force, Gerwig's Brooke is not its main character. That job falls to Lola Kirke's Tracy, a college freshman who aspires to be a writer. Because Tracy's mother (Kathryn Erbe) is engaged to Brooke's father, she encourages Tracy to call her soon-to-be step sister.

Driven by an inability to connect with her peers, Tracy contacts Brooke. Instantly, she's drawn into the vortex her future step-sister creates: parties punctuated by a blur of activities and a frenzied stream of ideas.

When Brooke's wealthy boyfriend decides not to fund the restaurant Brooke wants to open, she's forced to ask former boyfriend Dylan (Michael Chernus) to help her with money. That's no slam-dunk because Mamie-Claire (Heather Lind), Dylan's shrill wife, hates Brooke.

Joining Brooke on her trip to Dylan's upscale Connecticut home are one of Tracy's student friends (a droopy Matthew Shear) and his improbably jealous girlfriend (Jasmine Cephas Jones).

All of these characters and a stray from Mamie-Claire's book group gather for a scene in which Baumbach makes a major misstep: He tries his hand at farce.

Stocked with crisscrossing dialogue and rat-a-tat delivery, the movie's big farcical scene never achieves the level of urbanity and wit required to make it fly. Baumbach's attempt at screwball comedy mostly falls flat.

Good for a few chuckles and savvy about the way certain people are able quickly to create a seductive sense of intimacy, Mistress America winds up feeling like awfully thin gruel, a comedy that struck me as more interested in letting us know it's smart than in making us laugh.

A look at Frances, who lives in limbo

After a preview screening of the quietly instructive and often amusing new movie Frances Ha, I was chatting with someone who told me that he was about to attend the college graduation of a nephew, and that the young man had absolutely no idea about what to do with with the rest of his life.

That's hardly a revelation. A sagging economy has taken much of the luster off the American dream, and many young people seem to spend their 20s marking time, hoping that something -- anything -- will come along and catapult them into adulthood.

Frances Ha is the story of one such (you'll pardon the term) Millennial. The 27-year-old Frances (Greta Gerwig) has been living in a post-college limbo for as much as six or seven years, and her dream is on the verge of foundering. An aspiring dancer, Frances seems a little short on talent, and she's about to lose her position with a small dance company.

Frances' social life doesn't provide much relief, either. Her most enduring relationship is with her roommate Sophie (Mickey Sumner). The two have been close friends since college. In an early scene, Frances turns down an offer to live with her boyfriend because she's happy in the Brooklyn apartment she and Sophie share.

The catch: Sophie -- who works for a publishing company -- seems to have had her fill of impromptu living. She's planning to move into a Manhattan apartment. Not long after her departure, Sophie meets a man, and decides to have a serious relationship. She tells Frances that she's moving to Japan, where her new beau has been offered a major career opportunity.

Absent her roommate and confidant, Frances is in a place that can seem a little scary: She's officially and undeniably at loose ends.

Directed by Noah Baumbach (Greeenberg and The Squid and the Whale), Frances Ha would have been impossible without Gerwig, who gives Frances a galumphing walk and a large ration of naive charm. In Gerwig's hands, Frances becomes an amusing and even touching study of awkwardness, the unease that stems from not fitting into much of anything -- maybe even her own body.

After losing her roommate, Frances devotes substantial amounts of time to securing new quarters. She moves in with two men (Adam Driver and Michael Zegen), who charge her close to $1,000 a month for the privilege of sharing their space.

The movie also takes Frances to California, where she visits her parents, played by Gerwig's real parents (Christine and Gordon Gerwig).

Baumbach, who chose to shoot in refreshing black-and-white, makes room for a lonely Parisian interlude and a trip back to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., scene of Frances' college days.

Here's how I understand Frances. She was one of those kids who was raised by encouraging, middle-class parents who most likely supported her dream of being a professional dancer, but who never bothered to wonder whether Frances had sufficient talent for such a demanding and capricious path. She attended a good college, made friends and then moved to New York City, where she and Sophie became co-conspirators in all things.

I don't know if Baumbach hoped that Francis Ha would serve as a generational portrait or whether he simply wanted to introduce us to a character who grows on us, as Gerwig allows her comic abilities to blossom.

Even without giving it any larger meanings, Frances Ha has its rewards, most of them involving Gerwig's performance. At one point, Frances says that she's not yet a real person, her way of telling us that she's unable to make the transition into a settled adulthood. She's aware enough to know that her life isn't turning out as she might have imagined.

It's doubtful that Frances would see herself a representative of her generation, but I'm betting that she has plenty of company among those who currently are stuck in shapeless, ill-defined lives, unsure that they'll ever be able to move on.

Baumbach's movie doesn't entirely transform Frances' life, but it suggests that one way or another, she'll adapt. Gerwig may not be what you'd call a conventional screen presence, but she makes us believe that Sophie won't be defeated.

Old material in an ancient city

Woody Allen's To Rome With Love is no valentine.

Watching Woody Allen in his new film To Rome With Love, I found it impossible not to wonder whether, at 76, Allen hasn't lost a little something off his fast ball -- at least as an actor. Playing a retired opera director who believes he has discovered a gifted new tenor, Allen's one-liners arrive a bit late, like a tardy traveler after the train already has left the station.

But watching a cranky Allen do his cranky thing isn't the only problem with To Rome With Love: Allen isn't at his best behind the camera, either: To Rome with Love seems consistently off-key, a comedy that's unable to find a sustained rhythm.

In To Rome With Love, Allen plays Jerry, a man who visits Rome with his wife (Judy Davis) to meet his daughter (Alison Pill) and her new fiance (Flavio Parenti). When it comes to delivering a line, by the way, Davis doesn't miss a beat.

Jerry also meets the father of the future groom (Fabio Armiliato), an undertaker blessed with a beautiful singing voice -- but one he's only able to use while singing in the shower.

The undertaker's plight leads to a sight gag that stands as the movie's comic centerpiece, but you can see it coming all the way from the Via Veneto, and, once revealed, the joke is repeated enough to lose its edge.

Allen isn't only interested in Jerry's desperation. As if writing short stories for The New Yorker, he weaves a variety of brief tales into a series of alternating vignettes on love Roman style or, more precisely, Allen style -- adding a footnote about the perils of celebrity, which doesn't really amount to much.

In these additional stories, Alec Baldwin plays an architect who's revisiting Rome. Once an ambitious young man, Baldwin's John is a study in capitulation; he now designs shopping malls. Early on, John runs into a young architecture student (Jesse Eisenberg) who lives in the Trastevere neighborhood, John's former haunt.

Eisenberg's character shares an apartment and a relationship with Sally (Greta Gerwig), but he's smitten by one of Sally's visiting friends, a young actress played by Ellen Page.

Rather than developing into a real character, John becomes a kind of spectral observer: He's constantly commenting on Eisenberg's moves, warning him that if he falls for Page's Monica, he'll surely be sorry.

Allen uses another of the movie's stories to comment on the perils of celebrity. Roberto Benigni plays Leopoldo, a nondescript Roman who suddenly finds himself hounded by photographers and TV journalists eager to record his every thought -- no matter how banal. The joke here centers on the fact that Benigni's character is being stalked by an avid but fickle media that turns him into an attention junkie before shifting its gaze to someone else.

In yet another story, a provincial husband (Alessandro Tiberi) is forced to introduce a gorgeous hooker (Penelope Cruz) to his conservative Roman relatives, claiming that she's really his wife. This farcical situation arises after the young man's real wife (Alessandra Mastronardi) gets lost looking for a hair stylist in Rome, and winds up in a flirtatious relationship with an Italian actor (Antonio Albanese).

The point: Through these adventitious adulterous relationships, husband and wife are able to unlock their libidinous vaults -- and grow.

The fault here lies not with the cast, but with material that's too anemic to sustain full-blooded drama or robust farce. Even the Roman setting can't disguise the fact that Allen seems to be treading water.

To Rome With Love might have been unbearable had it not been for Rome itself. Allen and cinematographer Darius Khondji bathe the Eternal City in affectionate light as they take us through some of its major sites, seldom veering off the beaten track. But even that only goes so far.

Allen's final shot -- a brass band playing Volare on the Spanish Steps -- doesn't vibrate with the expected magic, and as I took it in, I felt much as I did throughout most of this pleasantly mediocre addition to Allen's amazingly large collection: It just wasn't enough.

'Arthur' didn't need remaking

An unnecessary remake of a medium-grade comedy.

After watching Russell Brand play an infantile drunken billionaire in the entirely unnecessary remake of 1981’s Arthur, I thought about stopping at the nearest saloon and ordering a double. A stiff drink might have washed away the taste of mediocrity that pervades a juvenile comedy that has been tweaked for a new century.

Whatever its faults, the original – which earned the estimable John Gielgud an Oscar for playing an imperious butler named Hobson -- tops this silly remake in nearly every way.

To begin with, Brand lacks even the small amounts of pathos that Dudley Moore brought to the title role, and Helen Mirren -- terrific an actress as she is – can’t add the same level of dry humor that marked a Gielgud performance steeped in witty disdain.

In fairness to Mirren, it should be noted that Gielgud was given better dialog. Besides, Mirren’s playing Arthur’s nanny, not his butler. Creepy, no? A grown man with a nanny? Is it hilarious when she Mirren’s Hobson tells Arthur to be sure to wash his “winky?” If you answered “yes” to that question, let’s agree never to talk dirty to each other.

Screenwriter Peter Baynham follows the same basic plot as the original. Arthur's mother orders her Hopelessly playboy son to marry an upper crust New Yorker or be disinherited. In the original, Arthur’s father – head of a large corporation -- issued the marriage ultimatum. The gender changes in Baynham’s script do little to freshen characters that weren’t exactly novel 30 years ago.

The 2011 edition of Arthur boasts a variety of additional miscalculations, not the least of which is the fact that the woman Arthur is ordered to marry (Jennifer Garner) is more appealing than the woman he falls for (Greta Gerwig), a Queens resident who conducts unauthorized guided tours at Manhattan's Grand Central Station and who aspires to write children’s books.

Baynham and director Jason Winer try to make the movie acceptable for 2011 with a half-hearted reference to the recession and an end-of-picture resolution that finds Arthur 12-stepping his way toward sobriety. And you certainly won’t be surprised to learn that the movie refuses to take its silliness straight, mixing in a bit of sentimentality at the end.

I suppose that one’s reaction to Arthur hinges on Brand, who looks more dissolute than Moore, who had the appearance of a drunken gnome. Funny as a wanton rock star in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Brand didn’t exactly knock me out in last year’s Get Him to the Greek, and he’s even less amusing here.

In a how-the-mighty-have-fallen aside, it should be noted that Nick Nolte appears in a small role as the father of Arthur’s fianceé. Watching Nolte do this kind of thankless job made me sad, which isn’t what a movie such as Arthur is supposed to do.

And, no, I didn’t stop for that drink. I went home and streamed the original on Netflix, an activity that only confirmed what I already suspected. The remake goes nowhere.