Jupiter's Wife

This is a very unusual documentary film. A film maker (Michel Negroponte) happens upon a mentally ill homeless lady (Maggie) who lives in New York's Central Park and befriends her--getting her to agree to be filmed over a period lasting several years. It is interesting to see the lady, as she clearly has schizophrenia and it's an interesting portrait of her life. Despite her being homeless and having a very tenuous hold on reality, Michel does not seem to get her assistance or call in competent psychological help. Instead, and this is the part that is pretty weird, he spends years trying to tease out what this woman's prior life had been based on her irrational though occasionally metaphorical speech as well as by making friends with people who know her. In some ways, his invasive following of the woman with a camera seems rather bizarre (perhaps exploitative) and his need to discover the truth about her made me occasionally wonder if BOTH of them were perhaps ill! Still, despite Michel's strange obsession and desire to make sense of Maggie's life, it is interesting and shows you the often marginal existence the severely mentally ill often have.

This is a great film for a psychology or social work class or for anyone who has a family member who is struggling with severe mental illness.

The first quarter of this movie went by so slowly that it almost put me to sleep. Fortunately, I hung onto it until the end, and I must say, it was one of the most thought-provoking documentaries I have ever seen. It made me more healthily skeptical about how much the modern sciences "medicalize" human behavior and make people fit under "boxes." Maggie's use of symbolism fit her own story that she was trying to weave, and it was sad that what others, specifically those who diagnosed her with a mental illness, could really look at was how it was not coherent with their own stories. Hence, they pushed her to fit into a box that supposedly deviates from that which is normal.

If you plan on watching it, make sure you watch it from beginning to end and pay attention to what Maggie says. You don't want to miss anything important.

A powerful image of homelessness and psychosis, in this movie we are presented with a paranoid schizophrenic who cannot let go of her delusions. We are brought into her world and are allowed to see an intimate portrayal of this woman. It is not exploitive. It is merely a powerful portrait of a very real person with very real problems, who chooses to deal with them by adopting an unreal view of her world.

The film is thought provoking and simple, although the emotion it evokes are far from simple. The filmmaker himself says he cannot give a Hollywood happy ending, and he does not. It is a postmodern biography of stark realism.

Maggie Cogan is certainly more charming and "lucid" than many of the schizophrenic homeless, and yet I was frustrated with the fact that she was "enabled", partly by the filmmaker but more annoyingly by the upper West Side "friend" (wife of actor Astin Pendleton) to continue her weary existence as some sort of free independent spirit rather than as a woman suffering from a disease that should at the very least require her to be on medication to allow her to live with some semblance of "normalcy". Maggie seems to understand this enabling, even making a remark about a better class of garbage on the Upper West Side, but schizophrenia as far as I understand it does not affect intelligence. One hopes Maggie gets to live on her horse farm.

I was very intrigued by this woman's story and history. However I kept wanting to know more details which would have seemed to be easy to provide yet the director did not. What was provided gave us a peek into this woman's life and story but that's all. I searched on Wikipedia for more info on her as it appears she is still living. She has an entry but it only sums up the sparse info from the film.

None the less I found the film inspiring. People cope in different ways from the events in their lives. All in all Maggie Cogan appears to be surviving and is happier than many non-homeless people. Again... really wanted to know much more about her.