Maggie’s Plan

As brand names continue to monopolize the Hollywood blockbuster, add the romantic comedy to the vanishing middle class of movie genres, along with westerns, crime films, musicals and more. Hollywood will still crank out the occasional star-heavy, rom-com monstrosity, usually directed by Garry Marshall, but otherwise independent filmmakers have been left to pick up the slack. It’s a great opportunity to remake the genre into something more socially and cinematically progressive than its forebears, which is why a middling dullard like Rebecca Miller’s Maggie’s Plan feels like such a grave disappointment. The film deals with subjects like marital infidelity and single-parent insemination in a world of hyperliterate New York intellectuals, but the aesthetics and storytelling of Maggie’s Plan are almost mechanically conventional. There are no real laughs in here, only chuckles of recognition at the rough cadence of comedy, acknowledgments of the empty spaces where we expect humor to reside. D.B.