Maggie

Henry Hobson’s début feature Maggie makes a valiant attempt at doing something fresh and interesting with the exhausted zombie-apocalypse genre.   Rather than focus on the outward threat of flesh-eating ghouls, Maggie explores the internal trauma of living with the experience of turning into one of the undead. The film stars Abigail Breslin in the title role; a teenage girl growing up in rural America at a time when much of the population, including her, is infected with a plague that turns people in to “necro-ambulists” (aka: the walking dead). Unlike most zombie narratives, in this story it takes about six to eight weeks from the time you are bitten to “the turn,” where you become a flesheater yourself. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Maggie’s father Wade who, after spending weeks searching for his daughter, finds her in a hospital and brings her back to his farm. Interestingly, Wade is able to retrieve Maggie not because of any of his Arnold Schwarzenegger attributes, but simply because he’s friends with one of the doctors—and allowing infected people to go home and spend their last few weeks with their families before being killed or quarantined is fairly standard practice in the movie’s decent, wholesome, libertarian vision of the Midwest. 

There’s something poignant in watching the Austrian megastar Schwarzenegger play a simple midwestern farmer named Wade who’s powerless to stop the disease growing inside his daughter.  Wade/Arnold has his convictions, his gun, his big truck, and (even now in his late 60s) his imposing size and exceptional strength, but these are all essentially useless to him. I’ve always been a fan of Schwarzenegger, and I’ve enjoyed several of his post-Governator, post-sex-scandal, post-retirement-age pictures—like the underrated The Last Stand (2013). There’s something wistful about a guy who was once the biggest thing in the world playing small, humbled, or ineffectual men. Unfortunately, Hobson doesn’t seem to possess the directorial magic necessary to elicit a substantial, multilayered performance from this admittedly limited actor.

Similarly, the contemporary political themes inherent in both the premise, and in the casting of the iconic left-leaning Republican, go underdeveloped.  Fears about the breakdown of the family, the dangers of untreatable epidemics, and the paranoia of big government taking away civil liberties are all woven through this story, yet they remain as unexplored as the main narrative conception—what it’s like to live with the knowledge that there’s nothing you can do to prevent an inevitable outcome.

Hobson and screenwriter John Scott 3 fail to integrate their dual storylines, and probably should have stuck to a single protagonist. When the initial main character, Wade, suddenly (and inexplicably) disappears from the screen a third of the way through, Maggie transforms into what it probably should have been all along—Maggie’s story. A movie about an adolescent girl who knows she's going to turn into a monster but doesn't want to give up on life is much more engaging than a movie about a powerless father. Part of the reason why the middle section works so much better then the rest is that Breslin is a far more nuanced actor than Schwarzenegger. Nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar at the age of eight for Little Miss Sunshine (2006), Breslin has continued to build a strong career in a variety of roles, averaging two films a year. In this understated performance she conveys Maggie’s angst and desperation as well as her moral strength and conviction. These qualities come across in strong scenes with her stepmother (Joely Richardson) and her peers, both the infected and the uninfected.  Whereas many teenage girls have strained relations with a stepparent, Maggie’s is justifiably afraid of her. And where most adolescent girls must deal with the normal confusing changes in their bodies, Maggie’s flesh is literally rotting away beneath her.

More scenes exploring Maggie’s distinctive dilemma would go a long way in making up for the lack of development in Wade’s predicament. It also would distract from the generic, almost amateurish way this film is shot—all extreme handheld close-ups with excessively minimal lighting and a color pallet so dull it actually enhances the narrative’s blandness. The idea of a low-budget Schwarzenegger movie and a zombie picture that emphasizes human emotions beyond simple fear and desperation is intriguing. Unfortunately Maggie doesn’t fully fulfill its promise.