"Maggie's Plan" insists that you CAN return your annoying husband back to his first wife, for a full refund.

What do you do if you’re in a bad marriage with a man who’s still in love with his ex-wife? Well, if you’re Maggie, you hope and pray that you can give him back for a refund. That’s the “plan” at the heart of the movie Maggie’s Plan, a Parent Trap of a different sort, and a film that happily thwarts the conventions of the romantic comedy. Maggie’s Plan itself is not a romantic comedy proper, but somewhere inside, there is a romantic comedy trying to get out. Instead, it’s a study of a mistress-turned-wife, an ex-wife, and the man they have to share. Each of them is fully equipped with eccentricities and neuroses. And while director Rebecca Miller often comes dangerously close to turning these three into caricatures, she knows how to rein herself in, molding them into complex human beings instead.

At the beginning of the film, Maggie arranges for an old college friend named Guy Childers (Travis Fimmel) to be her sperm donor. He is a self-described “pickle connoisseur” (perhaps a subtle allusion to a romantic comedy I adore, 1988’s Crossing Delancey). But then Maggie meets John (Ethan Hawke), a struggling academic/writer who’s married to Georgette (Julianne Moore), a brilliant professor at Columbia. John feels ignored by the far more successful Georgette (with whom he has two children), so when Maggie agrees to read a chapter of his novel, an unexpected romance develops. Cut to a few years later: Maggie and John are married with a kid of their own, but Maggie’s unhappy. She worries about being trapped in a loveless marriage, because she’s kind of tired of John, and especially because: she’s convinced that John is, in fact, still in love with Georgette.

For better or worse, Greta Gerwig has found a niche playing a wistful girl of 30 who’s a little lost, a little eccentric, and a little too smart for her own good. In Frances Ha, she was perpetually falling apart but somehow blissfully unfazed by it; in Mistress America, her wistfulness turned her into a monstrous figure, a woman hungry for social power, whose grandiose tales often defied fact-checking. And now, in Maggie’s Plan, Gerwig plays a woman trying to make a family for herself, despite the fact that she’s never been in a stable relationship for “more than six months”. Gerwig, more than any other actress, has become a poster child for the millennial generation, lost in the fragmented sea of modern life. But that’s not to say being lost is always a bad thing. What makes Gerwig’s performances likable is an often madcap defiance against her own circumstances. In all three films, she is propelled by her own definite notions of what ought to be rather than what is.

Julianne Moore’s Georgette is French, and Moore affects a sometimes distracting but, for me, enjoyably exaggerated accent that sounds like Madeline Kahn’s Lily von Schtupp in Blazing Saddles (even though Lily was German). When we first meet Georgette, she’s participating in a discussion panel, moderated by Wallace Shawn, about the Occupy movement, along with her husband. Georgette appears to be a cold, ruthless, intellectual bitch. She’s fashionably basic, and her little top-knot bun feels like the finishing touch on a woman who could kill you with merely a glance. But Julianne Moore, God bless her, hasn’t turned into Bette Davis yet, and Rebecca Miller has genuine feeling for Georgette, who’s a lot more vulnerable than it would first appear. So instead of degenerating into the villain of the movie, she becomes Maggie’s confidant.

Ethan Hawke has the least flashy performance, which probably makes his work the hardest. John is self-absorbed, the kind of guy who likes girls who like the things he says and does. And since he’s a writer, this flaw is compounded by the fact that’s already the typical needy, self-effacing artist. But even John, it turns out, is capable of love, and not merely a jerk.

The surprise MVPs of Maggie's Plan, however, are Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph, playing Maggie's married friends Tony and Felicia. Maggie once dated Tony, but while their romance fizzled, their friendship blossomed; and she works with Felicia, who says things like, "people say I'm a bitch, but I think I'm pretty nice." Every scene with these two needed to be longer.

Maggie’s Plan feels a tad slight, but the performances of Gerwig, Moore, and Hawke give the film a much-needed substance and vitality. It could easily be just another quirky indie film about quirky New Yorkers; and it while it kind of is that, the film is also something more interesting: a meditation on the ways men manipulate women (and vice versa). Georgette controls John, makes him feel invisible, but she also makes him feel needed; his relationship with Maggie is a complete reversal of that dynamic: he turns her into his housekeeper and book editor. There’s no longer any genuine love between them. And Maggie, always stuck on her own moral impulses, cannot endure a phony marriage, or a marriage that is, as he puts it, dead. “I’m in such deep oatmeal right now!” Maggie cries early in the film. It’s a wonderful, goofy line, indicative of Maggie’s character: She gets herself in plenty of messes without ever knowing how to clean them up; but somehow, she survives.

'Sausage Party' Will Make You Want to Set Your Food Free

Sausage Party will make you want to set your food free—from yourself—and you may never eat dinner again without wondering if you're actually committing genocide. It's like The Muppets and Julia Child on acid. This is an animated movie for adults that portrays consumable goods—everything from hot dogs to cherry tomatoes to toilet paper to Jose Cuervo—as sentient beings, each of them brandishing skinny little arms and legs and able to communicate with each other. Every morning, as the supermarket opens, they perform a musical number hastening the arrival of “the gods” (that’s us), each of them hoping she or he will be chosen. To be chosen is to be bought, and taken to “The Great Beyond.” Nobody knows what that means, but everyone assumes it’s a good thing, a wonderful, magical, eternally blissful thing. Of course, reality, which the grocery store’s inhabitants will learn, is far more horrifying. The film’s message is clear: religion is the opiate of the masses, the thing that those in power use to control us. And the writers—Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Kyle Hunter, and Ariel Shaffir—have crafted a canny, lucid thesis in defense of skepticism. Sausage Party is funny— sometimes uproariously funny—and surprisingly transcendent: at times, the gags (the film is ladled with jokes like a pot roast steeped in its own gravy) and the bleakness of the film’s message (there is no god, there is only the here and now) converge into a chaos of beautiful insanity. 

But the writers’ thesis-driven approach to comedy feels far too self-satisfied. It would be like if Blazing Saddles were trying to be Roots. In Blazing Saddles, which is one of the most important anti-racism films of the 1970s, the racists were idiots, and we were free to infer for ourselves just how wrong racism really is. Sausage Party, were it made in the 1970s, might be free to let us do some thinking on our own. But sadly it’s mired in message like a kindergarten class. And while I admire the film’s honesty, what I enjoy and delight in is its insanity, and Sausage Party often cannot do both at once. 

Here’s an example of insanity: Barry (voice of Michael Cera), a sausage, narrowly avoids being boiled to death in a woman’s kitchen; he escapes and ends up in the home of a 20-something stoner with crazy curly hair who, once he’s injected himself with bath salts, can see that all his food products are living creatures. (Normally, humans cannot perceive this because their version of reality is so limited.) Later in the film, when the consumables are battling the humans at the supermarket, Barry shows up with the severed head of this bath salt-addled junkie. Barry didn’t kill the guy (that would be far too mean-spirited); it was a freak accident. But when the noggin of this blazed lug plops down on the floor, and Barry yells triumphantly, “the gods can be killed!”, it’s a moment that is equally hilarious, moving, and bonkers. That’s the kind of thing that comedies need more of. 

But when Sausage Party fixates on its message against religion, it often feels as earnest as a kid-friendly Pixar movie. (Sidenote, the afore-mentioned drugged-out lunkhead drives a beat-up old car with a bumper sticker that reads, “Dixar.”) Seth Rogen, who plays the main character, a sausage named Frank, is the one who first discovers the truth about the Great Beyond, and he becomes the film’s literal voice of reason, championing free thought over blissful ignorance. When he angers the entire supermarket with his claims that the Great Beyond is a lie, he realizes he must be “nicer.” It feels smug and disingenuous, and really beneath everything else that’s happening in Sausage Party, because so much of Sausage Party is ingeniously crazy. It happily riffs on all the politics—be they racial, gender, what-have-you—of our time: two supporting characters are a Jewish bagel named Sammy Bagel, Jr. (voice of Edward Norton) and a Middle Eastern lavash named Kareem Abdul Lavash (voice of David Krumholtz); another character, the sultry lesbian Teresa del Taco (voiced by Salma Hayek) has a crush on Brenda, the other main character, a hot dog bun who’s in love with Frank. (She’s voiced by Kristen Wiig.) There’s a Native American character, Firewater (Bill Hader) who knows the truth but pretends not to: he’s imbued with all the stereotypes of the wise old Indian distilling knowledge (and weed). And, much like Blazing Saddles erupts in an orgy of chaotic violence at the end, Sausage Party erupts in an orgy too, the old-fashioned kind. 

As delightfully reprehensible as much of Sausage Party is, it loves silliness too, and accumulates a stock of wonderful little throwaway puns. Every adage about food you can imagine (“spill the beans”, “how do you like them apples?”) is thrown into the mix; when one character says, “Okay, so…”, a jar of sticky orange cheese suddenly appears and says, “Did somebody say ‘queso’?” And then there are moments that truly feel disturbing, like when a woman is preparing dinner, and we see the food being tortured and killed: a triumphant potato, the first item she picks up, suddenly screams in horror as she begins to skin him and then tosses him into a pot of boiling water; the woman then pops two baby carrots into her mouth, and we see her teeth chomping them into bits from the inside while outside, horrifying foods wail, “She’s eating children!” So if we have to have our comedies doused in messages today, at least some filmmakers are still jolting us with the kind of nutty, irreverent insanity that makes the genre an urgently needed antidote to our own reality.

Directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernan. With voices of Nick Kroll (as one of the film’s chief villains, a douche), James Franco, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Paul Rudd, and Anders Holm. 

Trainwreck

Redemption is the theme embedded within Judd Apatow’s latest comedy, Trainwreck, which was written by its star, Amy Schumer. Schumer’s character, also named Amy, doesn’t believe in committed relationships. She doesn’t care if her men sleep with other girls. She’s not longing for the one great romance that will result in marriage and children and settling down. Amy has a job for a popular men’s magazine called Snuff (run by a real monster, played to absolute perfection by Tilda Swinton); she has her own apartment in the city; she has friends, and a happily dysfunctional relationship with her ailing father (Colin Quinn) and younger sister (Brie Larson), both of which run on a kind of cynical humor which occasionally boils over into genuine meanness (mostly on Amy’s part). And so, we know from the beginning that Amy is going to need to be saved from herself and from her reckless living. It’s really astonishing how Victorian it all is. Amy is almost a Becky Sharp (Thackeray’s deliciously odious heroine in Vanity Fair), taking down the society around her, except, unlike Sharp, Amy ultimately trades in her social anarchy for conformity.

And here is where I want to parse out something. I found Amy (the character) totally irritating. She was genuinely mean to every guy in her life, even the nice one, the nerdy-but-lovable-orthopedic-surgeon-to-the-stars played by Bill Hader. I wanted him to dump her and let her stew in her own misery. This has nothing to do with Amy’s lifestyle and everything to do with the fact that she is a generally unlikable person with whom we the audience are expected to sympathize. (Again, I mean the character of Amy, not the actress Amy Schumer.) Unlike one of those great Victorian heroines, thumbing her nose at the arbitrary and stodgy conventions of society, Amy aims her middle finger squarely at anyone and everyone who tries to love her. 

Of course, you will say, that’s the whole point. She can’t accept love because she doesn’t love herself. She resorts to snarky criticism of others’ work and choices in order to deflect her own fear of failure. Amy diagnoses these maladies herself, somewhere in the course of the more-than-two-hour-long saga. But I don’t care. It doesn’t make this Ebenezer Scrooge change-of-heart story any less harder to take. In fact, I think Bill Hader would have fared better with Scrooge. 

The movie might have succeeded in its redemption story if it weren’t for the fact that everything about Amy Schumer’s comedy—both in and out of this film—works toward a kind of critique of such things as stock romantic comedies where women are dominated by men and churned through the domesticity factory. Amy doesn’t exactly end up a Stepford wife by the finale of Trainwreck, but she does embrace a kinder, gentler version of herself, one who’s also willing to perform a sexy cheerleader dance with the help of the Knicks City Dancers. What’s so strange about this movie is that Bill Hader’s character is such a good guy that he’s the kind of man you’d want your daughter/sister/ friend to end up with. You want her to stop being such a monster to him. But somehow, her "redemption" is never really that. It's more of a self-policing job. And Hader's character becomes her punching bag, so often that we start to lose respect for him to a degree. 

The monster-heroine plot would probably have been fine on its own, perhaps even as low-camp (especially if this had been about the Tilda Swinton character, whom I absolutely loved), but forcing Amy Schumer’s politically charged humor to conform to the conventions of the romantic comedy works against everything that’s funny in the movie. (And there are a lot of funny moments; I would be lying if I told you otherwise.) Trainwreck ultimately re-affirms everything that every other romantic comedy espouses—the acquiring of spouses. And any smart critique of say, the arbitrary conventions of society, falls apart.

What’s really astonishing is the fact that movies today are surprisingly more conservative and conventional than they’ve ever been, especially in the romantic comedy genre. This month, I watched a terrific Barbara Stanwyck vehicle, Ball of Fire (1941), directed by Howard Hawks and co-starring Gary Cooper, in which Stanwyck moves in with a bunch of bachelor-professors to escape the police and her crimelord boyfriend, quickly and deliberately wooing Cooper out of his academic impotence. Stanwyck, who specialized in playing untamably reckless women, always gets her men to loosen up, and she never has to undergo the kind of moral purification to which Amy is subjected. And what’s more, nobody makes a big thing of it. It’s just entertaining and clever. Stanwyck’s arts were perhaps never put to better use than in the 1941 Preston Sturges screwball comedy The Lady Eve, in which she plays a card shark who cons and then falls for a clueless millionaire snake-handler played by Henry Fonda. Again, she's a "bad" woman right to the end, and there's no sign that she'll become "good" post-nuptials. It seems that, 75 years later, our movies have actually regressed. Amy Schumer is very funny and very talented, and I admire her humor-laced-with-politics. But I wish she and others would take some cues from the Barbara Stanwycks of Old Hollywood, women whose work was always subversive and funny and sexy and complex. 

With LeBron James (who’s very likable, playing himself), John Cena, Jon Glaser, Vanessa Bayer, and Ezra Miller.

They Came Together

A throwback to the insipidly silly gags of the Naked Gun movies and Airplane (written by the Abrahams/Zucker/Zucker trio), They Came Together is a cheeky, "meta" spoof of romantic comedies, although, it's not exactly a pure spoof. It's more like watching a group of smart-ass comic writers give a tongue-in-cheek presentation on the tropes of the romantic comedy genre. Watching They Came Together, I was plagued with a nagging question: If this movie contained the enjoyable but dumb kind of humor of a Naked Gun movie (which I appreciate sometimes) as well as the presence of a slew of funny actors I love (including the great Amy Poehler as the romantic lead), why did I just want this movie to end?

The answer is quite simple. In the process of picking apart and laughing at the clichés of romantic comedies, They Come Together feels not different or clever, merely familiar. It falls into the bad-spoof trap of failing to tell an original story of its own. Indeed, They Came Together isn't much better than those wretched Scary Movie installments, all of which merely ape scenes and lines from the latest horror franchises. They don't actually try and tell an amusing story into which the parodies and references can be mixed.

The movie opens with Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd sitting across from another couple at a dimly lit restaurant. They're about to tell them (and us) how they met, and we're informed that their story is just like a corny romantic comedy. When the flashback starts, we see all the right notes being hit: Poehler's a klutz, but exaggerated to the point of absurdity. And she owns a too-adorable-not-to-like candy store that is about to be pounced on by the giant candy conglomerate for which Rudd works. That's when they meet and an unlikely romance begins. The detail about Poehler's character owning a candy store is priceless, one of the truly inspired jokes of this movie.

They Came Together is laugh-out-loud funny for about twenty minutes, until it goes completely stale and you start to feel that through some ingenious maneuvering of space and time you've been teleported to the Hallmark Channel. I grew restless. I perused my email. I sighed. I checked the remaining running time over and over. And it's mercilessly short at 83 minutes, but those minutes couldn't have gone by fast enough. What's so depressing about this movie is the sheer waste of talent. It would have been far better for them to have put the full power of their energy, intelligence, and comic wit and spontaneity into making a legitimate romantic comedy that was equal parts original and intelligent and funny. Instead, it's a forgettable pastiche that feels lazily contrived with nothing but a smarmy distaste for a popular genre, one that is an especially easy target.

With Cobie Smulders, Max Greenfield, Christopher Meloni, Bill Hader, Ellie Kemper, Jason Mantzoukas, Melanie Lynskey, Ed Helms, Michael Ian Black, plus cameos by, among others, Norah Jones, Ken Marino, Jack McBrayer, Adam Scott, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Michael Shannon, and Judge Judy. Directed by David Wain. Written by Wain and Michael Showalter.

The To Do List

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In The To Do List, Aubrey Plaza plays a recent high school graduate named Brandy. She’s the valedictorian, the “nerd”, the girl who knows when to use “whom” and not “who” but has almost no sexual knowledge. After graduation her best friends drag her to a party where she gets drunk and makes out with a ripped guitar-playing college student with stringy blond hair (Scott Porter). But when the night ends in humiliation, Brandy makes a list of every sexual act she can think of and commits to doing each one over the summer. Ever emboldened by a well-thought-out checklist, Brandy embarks on a sexual quest.

The To Do List is a pernicious piece of propaganda designed to re-inflict the horrors of 90s fashion and music on an unsuspecting audience. It’s set in the summer of 1993. My guess is that writer-director Maggie Carey was a teenager in the 90s, so this is her love letter to that bygone era of Sarah MacLachlan, Hillary Clinton, Janine Garofalo, and baggy clothes. (Brandy idolizes the former First Lady, while her conservative father, who’s terrified of discussing sex with his two daughters, reads Rush Limbaugh.)

While there were funny parts in The To Do List, the film’s brazen attempt to be shocking left me feeling slightly disturbed. I felt that my inner-puritan had suddenly and without warning been awakened and mobilized. When it comes to sexual activity, Brandy doesn’t beat around the bush. She goes for what she wants with a kind of scientific rapaciousness: Brandy’s not interested in intimacy. She’s interested in experience. Perhaps because her two friends (played by Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat and Sarah Steele) are constantly goading her about her chaste existence, Brandy feels left out of the party, like a kind of sexual freak who can’t even kiss a guy correctly.

Aubrey Plaza has this quality that runs throughout her performances in the delightful show Parks and Recreation as well as in her previous movie, Safety Not Guaranteed: she’s the unaffected hipster. Nothing can penetrate the wall she puts up to guard herself from other people. It’s one of the funniest things about her character on Parks, but it’s also the reason she’s not the lead character. In The To Do List, she’s still milking that quality, but the film seems determined to fix it. After an hour-and-a-half of Brandy’s sexual quest, she suddenly decides that sex can be a big deal, but it isn’t always, and shouldn’t have to be. That’s a wonderfully convenient mixed message for youth in 1993 or 2013. With the onset of AIDS a full-blown pandemic in the early 90s, you’d expect perhaps a little more responsibility from a movie so invested in sex.

But, much like the sitcoms of the 90s (Friends and Seinfeld come to mind), this movie lives in a world without AIDS or any other negative consequences from irresponsible sexual activity. (There is a scene where Brandy requests that her latest sexual partner wear a condom so as to avoid AIDS or pregnancy, but it’s delivered in a kind of mock-serious tone that seems disingenuous.) Then Brandy complains that all guys want is sex. This after she has forcefully taken the lead in every one of her sexual encounters over the past few months.

And at the end, when you’re hit over the head with the movie’s ambiguous message, you may feel as manipulated as the dumb guys Brandy’s been using for her “research.” A raunch movie that tries to make some kind of loosey-goosey statement about sex feels like a cop-out both as a raunch movie and as a kind of responsible social commentary.

With  Johnny Simmons as Cameron, the boy who likes Brandy, Bill Hader as the losery guy who runs a public swimming pool, Rachel Bilson as Brandy’s nymphomaniac of a sister, Andy Samberg, Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Donald Glover as three of Brandy’s other conquests, and Connie Britton and Clark Gregg as Brandy’s parents. ★½