Review : Maggie’s Plan – Artificial Insemination, Blended Families and Control Freaks!

This movie was marketed a some sort of romantic comedy. It was niether romantic nor funny (well except Julianne Moore’s terrible attempt at a Danish accent!). I wouldn’t really recommend going to see it unless you are one of those people who has seen everything under the sun. Actually no, even then don’t. Instead watch something with subtitles or something foreign without subtitles. Watch some porn if you have to. Go for a walk off a cliff. Yes, it was that bad and a waste of 2 hours of my life.

The plot is a far-fetched tale which centres around this control freak called Maggie who has decided to get pregnant by with the local pickle entrepreneur (maybe this is a bit funny too) via artificial insemination. As fate has it, at around the same time as she is busy trying to knock herself up she falls madly in love (I wasn’t convinced) with this married man who subsequently leaves his wife + kids to have a family with the Other Woman (NB not clear who Maggie’s baby daddy is). Anyway, after a few years playing house with the married man and trying to manage a blended family (the half Danish kids are constantly slagging her off in Danish) Maggie has this light bulb moment when she realises that actually her husband (yeah, the one she stole!) actually fits better with his ex-wife than he does with her. Then miraculously these two women join forces to hatch some elaborate plan to bring the original couple together. You can guess the rest.

So, despite being a pretty rubbish movie I think for the purposes of this blog it did raise some interesting questions. Firstly, it did provide some insight into the realities of modern family life. Although many of us, myself included, still chase after this traditional idea of happily ever after – hot husband, that’ll help create a couple of perfect children, move to the ‘burbs, etc, etc. But the fact is that this isn’t the reality for most people. Lots of relationships these days are plagued with divorce, infidelity and other such non-fairytale like things. Boundaries are changing and that idea of what a family should look like is rapidly changing.

I’m running into to more and more women that hit 35 ish and realize that they can’t waste the rest of their child-bearing years waiting for a man to impregnate the fun/traditional way and they essentially head to the sperm bank and do it for themselves. Because women, well at least in more developed countries, are more financially independent they no longer need support of a man/another party to help them raise a child. They other advantage, I guess many people see with the modern way of doing things is that instead of getting knocked up by just anyone/someone you love but maybe isn’t genetically that gifted, you get to vet your potentially baby Daddy. Basically this way give your child the best chance of being born with blond hair and blue eyes or with a mind for mathematics  (as was the draw card in Maggie’s case).

I honestly don’t know how I feel about the whole artificial insemination issue. Part of me doesn’t feel there is a need to bring in more humans into this big bad world and I sincerely doubt I’d actually CHOOSE to go it alone but one should never say never I guess. The thought of choosing super sperm is also a bit much for my fragile mind to handle. I mean we all know that kids often turn out to be the opposite of their parents and most of us were probably told that the stork delivered the wrong child (OK, maybe that was just me). But what happens when you’ve PAID to have a child that is crazy clever and it turns out they just want to be a sex blogger or sit on the beach all day and do yoga? Does that mean they will be loved less?  Just seems like another symptom of this age of consumerism we live in to me.We’ll probably start seeing law suits when people don’t get they child they paid for. I guess it’s a method that would seem appealing to the control freaks of

Anyways, the whole issue is a bit of a minefield and I expect I’ll get a few objections to me views but you know we all enjoy a good debate. So Rinsers….Have you seen this movie? What are your thoughts? And on the wider issue of traditional family units being a thing of the past? Are you all for women doing it for themselves or do you think its a little bit too sci-fi? Thoughts in the comments below.