Where's Woody Allen when you need him?

Where's Woody Allen when you need him? The characters and social setting that he depicted so well, with wit and sympathy and imagination and credibility, in so many of his movies have been usurped in Rebecca Miller's Maggie's Plan and to ill effect. Here again we have young professionals and intellectuals in Manhattan and environs wrestling with issues of love and commitment, forming good friendships and enduring lousy relationships - but such a differences here in tone. These characters, led by the talented but getting-too-predictable (must she always portray an awkward, strangely costumed, single woman on the edge of worry about commitment?) Greta Gerwig, just never feel real or believable, not for a second: we always sense that they're actors playing their lines, and, as in too many movies, they are characters, not people - from the "cute meet" to the preposterous skewering of an academic debate to the bratty bright kids to the clumsy gags about artificial insemination to the cheesy Gerwig-Hawke falling-in-love, just nothing, nothing worked for me. Has Ethan Hawke ever played a less likable character? And what's Julianne Moore doing with that Russo-Franco accent? Honestly, I had to bail out after Act One but have it on good authority that it was downhill from there. (Gerwig was far better in Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha, which treated similar moods and anxieties, albeit at a slightly younger stage in life, with sensitivity and brio.)