A few years ago, New York filmmaker Michel Negroponte went to Central Park, wielding his VHS camera and entertaining thoughts of making a documentary about the history of the park, intermingled with his own childhood memories of the area as an 843-acre playground.
But his intentions took an unexpected twist when he bumped into Maggie Cogan, a middle-aged woman who was walking several dogs on leashes, wearing headphones and carrying a large backpack stuffed with blankets on her shoulders.
At first Negroponte wondered why a professional dog walker would be carrying such a huge backpack, but when he struck up a conversation with Cogan, he discovered she was a homeless woman and the dogs had become her surrogate family.
We've all had occasion to notice homeless persons on the streets or in parks, and we've probably wondered what a particular person's story was - how he or she was led to this station in life.
Negroponte had that thought in this instance and began meeting with Cogan on a regular basis over the next couple of years, VHS-camera in hand. He also began researching her personal history, to try to find the truth about this woman's background and her current state of mind.
Though she is articulate and has a sense of humor, Cogan also seems to have created a mythological profile for herself, claiming to be the daughter of the late actor Robert Ryan, the wife of the Greek god Jupiter and the mother of quintuplets, as well as two other sons. She also claims to be psychic and says that she receives radio messages from Jupiter in the headphones she wears.
"I feel like I'm in a foreign country without my phrase book," Negroponte says, but he suspects Cogan's dialogue is something more than the arbritrary juxtaposition of arbitrary thoughts.
Slowly, methodically, Negroponte pieces together Cogan's life in conversations with her and with some of her friends, as well employing extensive library research. Among other things, he discovers that Cogan was the first female horse-and-carriage driver in Central Park, which made her a minor celebrity in the late '60s. He manages to uncover newspaper stories about her, an old Universal newsreel that uses her as a subject and an appearance she made on thetelevision game show "What's My Line?" in 1968.
The result of all this is a fascinating and highly personal look at one woman's sad life, as well as a filmmaker's attempts to document that life and, along the way, help out his subject, if that's possible.
"Jupiter's Wife" is not rated and has nothing offensive, but contains adult themes.