Maggie and Annie

I don’t want to be too mean towards Maggie and Annie. This movie felt earnest in its intention to make a movie with queer representation and love. Sadly, it’s still not very good. And additionally, Maggie and Annie has an absolute downer of an ending. Even this, a lighthearted movie made for a queer audience can’t seem to fathom a happy ending for its queer characters.

Hurting for original ideas, Maggie and Annie is a story Annie, a wife and mother who falls in love with a Maggie, a lesbian. The women initially meet when Annie joins Maggie’s softball team. Quickly the two women develop a connection. On an overnight trip to play an away game, Maggie and Annie sleep together. They then continue their affair while Annie frets about the fact that she’s married.

To begin, this is not a successful romance. Maggie and Annie don’t have chemistry. They’re supposed to have an immediate romantic connection but the only reason I know that is because of the saccharine acoustic song that plays over one of their early meetings. If not for the blatant music queue, Maggie and Anne’s boring conversation and lack of chemistry wouldn’t have clued me in that these women are falling for each other. And the relationship doesn’t really improve. Because of their lack of chemistry, this allegedly passionate love affair never comes off that way. On Annie’s end it seems less like she’s taken with Maggie and more like she’s just bored by her husband and child. There’s a lot of talk about how for them, it was love at first sight. I’m not necessarily against this as a romantic trope, but here it seems lazy and doesn’t work.

In general, there is no subtlety to the writing and story here. Maggie and Annie definitely breaks the “show don’t tell” rule. This movie tells you everything. Every feeling the characters have and plot advancement is told to the audience through blatant, info dump dialogue. The dialogue rarely exists to develop character and more to just tell the audience where we’re at in the story. When it’s not lazy exposition, the dialogue meanders. There’s an argument that it’s supposed to be naturalistic but really, it’s boring and feels like a first draft. Yes, these conversations feel like real life conversations but only in that they’re boring, pointless and not interesting.

Annie’s husband has a weird arc. For the first half of the movie, he fetishizes Maggie’s lesbian identity and the possibility that she might be into his wife. I initially decided he deserved to have his wife become a lesbian because he was being gross about the whole thing. Then, Annie starts having an affair and the husband turns a corner so I had to change my opinion. Annie’s blatant disregard for her husband wasn’t deserved. He ends up being a selfless, loving husband who wants his wife to be happy, even if that means her having an affair. Near the end of the film, he tells Maggie they could share Annie as he just wants her to be happy but remain a part of his life. I was ready to write that this movie did something right as I thought that was a great ending to this love triangle.

But then tragedy strikes! Maggie gets in a freak accident. She lives just long enough for Annie to confess her love and hold Maggie’s hand as she dies. Yeah, this movie buries its gays. Out of nowhere! Not only was this a freak accident, but felt tonally off with the rest of the movie. There are movies where having a queer character die is justified because that’s the kind of movie it is. Maggie and Annie isn’t one of those. This is a really egregious example of burying your gays. Up until now, the film was pretty lighthearted. Yet it still ends tragically. I don’t even really blame the movie for so much as I dunno, society or whatever. It’s genuinely quite sad to me that even in 2002, the creators of this film didn’t know how else to end a lesbian romance other than a sudden death.

Maggie and Annie isn’t good. It’s low budget, low talent and ends with a dead lesbian. I do think the movie was trying to be positive representation. I think the film came from a place of wanting to see and depict lesbian romance in film. What’s upsetting is that in my opinion, it ends up being negative queer representation. The last minute bury your gays moment here is so indicative of the problem with media’s representation of the LGBTQ* community up until basically the past decade. We don’t need films like this; that suggest that regardless of what path they take or what tone the story is, gay characters will die. That’s disheartening and sad. And with Maggie and Annie, it’s not like this was a sad ending tacked onto a half decent film. The film was always bad, it just didn’t need to be sad as well.

Overall rating: 2.3/10

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