Product Details

• Directors: Michel Negroponte
• Format: NTSC
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: New Video Group
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 5554884830

Editorial Reviews

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

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Riviting and Beautiful-Fragile Grace of Life, November 18, 2000

By 

A Fencing Cat (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jupiter's Wife [VHS] (VHS Tape)

I saw this documentary at a film festival back home which included a "question and answer" open forum with the film crew. I am still moved by this woman, her story and "this land of many hats, yes we wear them"... This documentary grasps the grace, fragility, and beauty of human existence. Just buy it. You'll buy more for friends. The documentary will "center" you more than any yoga session at the Y will ever do.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the real face of "family values"....., January 30, 2007

By 

Craig Chalquist, PhD, author of TERRAPSYCHOLO... (Bay Area, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Jupiter's Wife (DVD)

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.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Story of Maggie, February 22, 2000

By 

Juliet M. Grigsby (St. Paul, MN USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Jupiter's Wife [VHS] (VHS Tape)

I rarely watch anything twice, but after seeing this film, the story stayed in my mind for a long time and I've watched it again from time to time to fit all the pieces and, more importantly, not to forget. To see how circumstances can change one's life forever and how one copes with things that are too painful to acknowlege is what struck me about this film. It is a tragic film as to what might have been and one can't help but love Maggie with her lyrical speech and laughing manner which mask what lies underneath which even she herself can't bear to remember.