Jupiter's Wife

Starring:Maggie Cogan, Katina Pendleton
Director: Michel Negroponte
Studio: New Video Group
Product Type: DVD

Editorial Review:
Amazon.com
This quietly poignant 1994 documentary chronicles the life of Maggie, an intelligent and enigmatic homeless woman on the streets of New York City, and the relationship she develops with the filmmaker, who attempts to piece together the threads of her life story. The director narrates his search for answers to Maggie's past, using interviews with friends and acquaintances as well as archival footage, from a newsreel of his subject in the 1960s driving a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park to her appearance on a popular game show, all in an effort to understand how this woman ended up homeless. More importantly, director Michel Negroponte takes his cues in unraveling the mystery from Maggie herself, documenting her beliefs that she is the daughter of 1940s matinee idol Robert Ryan and the wife of the ancient Roman god Jupiter. In stark vérité style, the film follows Maggie's search for stability and peace, taking care of stray dogs and finding a place she can call home. Sometimes sad, sometimes hopeful, and startlingly original, Jupiter's Wife is a compassionate real-life portrayal of survival in the modern age. --Robert Lane
Description
Ten years following its theatrical debut, this astonishing real-life mystery continues to haunt audiences around the world. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and widely hailed by critics, JUPITER'S WIFE tells the story of Maggie, a beguiling homeless woman living in New York City's Central Park. A captivating jumble of cryptic stories, Maggie claims to be the daughter of the Hollywood movie star Robert Ryan and married to the Roman god Jupiter. The cameras follow Maggie for the next two years, as clue by clue, her enigma is deciphered and an astonishing story is revealed.

Amazon.com

This quietly poignant 1994 documentary chronicles the life of Maggie, an intelligent and enigmatic homeless woman on the streets of New York City, and the relationship she develops with the filmmaker, who attempts to piece together the threads of her life story. The director narrates his search for answers to Maggie's past, using interviews with friends and acquaintances as well as archival footage, from a newsreel of his subject in the 1960s driving a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park to her appearance on a popular game show, all in an effort to understand how this woman ended up homeless. More importantly, director Michel Negroponte takes his cues in unraveling the mystery from Maggie herself, documenting her beliefs that she is the daughter of 1940s matinee idol Robert Ryan and the wife of the ancient Roman god Jupiter. In stark vérité style, the film follows Maggie's search for stability and peace, taking care of stray dogs and finding a place she can call home. Sometimes sad, sometimes hopeful, and startlingly original, Jupiter's Wife is a compassionate real-life portrayal of survival in the modern age. --Robert Lane

Description

Ten years following its theatrical debut, this astonishing real-life mystery continues to haunt audiences around the world. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and widely hailed by critics, JUPITER'S WIFE tells the story of Maggie, a beguiling homeless woman living in New York City's Central Park. A captivating jumble of cryptic stories, Maggie claims to be the daughter of the Hollywood movie star Robert Ryan and married to the Roman god Jupiter. The cameras follow Maggie for the next two years, as clue by clue, her enigma is deciphered and an astonishing story is revealed.

DVD Features: Never-Before-Seen Scenes; Filmmaker Biography; Filmmaker Statement; Interactive Menus; Scene Selection

Customer Reviews:

the real face of "family values"............2007-01-31

C. G. Jung once had a patient who believed she lived on the moon. So Jung met her there. As she realized he took her experiences as valid, she told a sad tale of vampires and isolation. Eventually, this woman who'd been abused as a girl made her way back to earth. Patients like her had taught Jung that the fact of a person's madness did not in any way invalidate the richness and authenticity of their personal mythology.

It would be easy to dismiss--to "shrink"--Maggie Cogan's inner world. Having been homeless in Central Park, she clearly displays the classic symptoms of schizophrenia. She is one of thousands and thousands of women in the U.S. left without adequate health care or even the means to support themselves. As her story gradually emerges, the trained watcher wonders whether her schizophrenic predisposition would have manifested so floridly had she not been subjected to the events described in this film. As a result, she believes she is Hera, wife of Zeus, or in Roman terms, Juno, the wife of Jupiter. She wears a radio strapped to her head so she can be "on the airwaves" tuned in to what's happening. (She finds New York gridlock amusing and avoids it.) The filmmaker decided to listen in and, at one point, not only investigate her past, but contact social services personnel to get her some help. Unfortunately, they showed up with sledgehammers and knocked down her shed. No squatters allowed, even in a New York winter.

When I show this film to graduate students I suggest that they hold it on at least two levels simultaneously--the needless tragedy of this homeless woman's life, and the mythological dimension that surrounds it like an aura--without reducing one to the other and thereby falling into either the shrinkage of reductionism or the romanticization of mental illness. Maggie Cogan is a person with a story to tell, a survivor, an inspiration, and a face of reality behind all the political jingoism to justify spending billions on weapons while Americans starve. She is also a parable. In ancient times storytellers and listeners knew the world remained in balance so long as Jupiter and Juno remained in relations of mutual empowerment. But today, as the plutocracy consumes the planet surface ("plutocracy" from Pluto, god of death and wealth), Jupiter has lost his throne to President Mars, the family in all its versions is on the brink of bankruptcy, and Hera is no longer the Queen of Heaven, maternal image of feminine authority. She lives on relief in New Jersey, where she looks after her puppies, goes without medication, and listens in on the pulse of the times without losing her dignity or her sense of the ironic.

A Romantic Conversation.......2006-04-27

Is it schizophrenia, or just a well-developed personal mythology? Or perhaps even a fate predestined in ancient times, the "romantic conversation" of a woman who has determined to devote her time and energy to maintaining the strength of her million-year-long marriage to the god Jupiter.

In "Jupiter's Wife," Michel Negroponte introduces us to Maggie, a homeless woman who spends her days wandering through Central Park, surrounded by her dogs, amused by her radio and drawing comfort from her belief that extra-sensory perception allows her to anticipate and understand what is happening in her world.

Negroponte's portrayal of Maggie and her life is free of the kinds of judgments or pathos that one might expect in a film about a schizophrenic.

When Maggie is compelled to submit to a psychiatric exam in order to qualify for a rent subsidy, Negroponte shows us Maggie's version of the interview and allows us to share her relief and amusement that an event so intrusive and potentially threatening to her self-image turns out to be so perfunctory and impersonal.

The filmmaker's affection for his subject creates for the viewer an atmosphere of respect and a suspension of disbelief. We begin to see this mentally ill individually from an entirely new perspective. What if she's not crazy? Maybe this is a person who has simply constructed a sensible world for herself that doesn't make sense to anyone else. When Negroponte asks Maggie to explain what ESP is and how it works, she says it is a "finely tuned understanding of other people and what they want and how they can achieve their goals relative to your goals so we can all just move this everlasting peace grid just down that much closer to earth so that there's peace."

Poets and songwriters have said stranger things.

"Jupiter's Wife" succeeds in challenging our preconceptions about homelessness and mental illness, and encourages us to remember that there is a complex and valuable human being beneath the apparent craziness. Let us hope that this fresh insight comes to mind when we encounter those people who are perhaps less beguiling than Maggie, but who are sleeping out on the grates or in doorways or in the great urban parks under "the everlasting peace grid."

Picturesque idyll about tragic circumstances.......2005-05-02

Michel Negroponte, the director of this documentary, wanders into Central Park and encounters Maggie, a whimsical magical creature, who may be in contact with a real alternate universe made up of Roman and other mythological creatures and stories. Kind of like the reality Mr. Negroponte initially projects onto the park: idylllic, beautiful, mythological. Throughout the film we get to know Maggie, as the director inserts himself into her life and tries to "help" her: because Maggie is a charming, intelligent, mentally ill homeless woman. Maggie is interesting and we are glad to get to know and gain some understanding of her plight, as most of us usually do not get a chance to do with the mentally ill or the homeless. But, I question Mr. Negroponte's honesty and purpose in this piece. Why is it that he chose to highlight his naive (ignorant?) desire to help her rather than more on Maggie herself? Or more on the homeless and/or mentally ill in the park? Why did he choose to depict this woman as ethereal and happy as he begins his film, when mental illness and homelessness are really such tragic and often hopeless social and personal problems? Or is this piece really about the privileged filmaker finding a quaint subject to use for his art project and becoming disillusioned by what is actually a tragic reailty? Poor guy.

The perfect picture of the beauty of the human psyche.......2003-11-11

This movie demonstrates the beauty of the human mind, and the fact that my (and your)reality isn't always right. Maggie, though she could probably be labeled as schizophrenic, is probably happier than the majority of individuals that are "healthy". This movie demonstrates what the mind needs to be happy. ? This movie may or may not change your life. If it does, you will forever see the world differently, and every individual as filled with the possibility of being whole.

interesting story doesnt make an interesting film.......2002-08-30

First off, let me apologize for only watching half the film before writing this review. For a while I thought...maybe it will change, maybe the end will redeem the beginning. Then I couldn't take it anymore. Maggie's story is interesting, intriguing, and portrayed in a respectful manner. The filmmaker is clearly truly interested in and affected by her and her story. But his flat voice interrupts all too frequently to give no further insight or commentary than blunty stating his growing interest. If there were more her, I think I would have been much more interested in it. As it is, I felt that the parts that showed her, rather than guiding and teaching us about her, illustrated his monotonous voice.

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