The Misadventures of Margaret (1998)

I had to get this movie through Blockbuster since Netflix doesn't have it. Here is a playful literary romp through the life of an insecure first novelist (Parker Posey), with her devoted English professor husband (Jeremy Northam), pushy sister (Elizabeth McGovern), ditzy lesbian friend (Brooke Shields), and an assortment of real and fictional characters she encounters as she researches an 18th-century erotic diary that has inspired her second novel. It's always hard to follow up on a successful first novel, so she is constantly schwitzing about whether her career is over before it began while simultaneously experiencing the pangs of her libido as she closely studies the florid text of the erotic diary, even leaving her husband for an extended stay at the estate where the diary was written. Passages from the diary are enacted in scenes that interlace with her contact with the silent cloister of singing nuns that now inhabits the estate and the single male recording artist who is taping them. The movie feels a lot like Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn channeling Kate & Leopold, with glib and poetic dialog (including a higher than average number of quotable witticisms, such as "Save some insanity for menopause!"). The 18th-century "philosopher" who takes on a female "disciple" predictably uses the "explorations of the mind" as a pretext for the explorations of the flesh, but it's mostly talk with some male and female nudity. Parker Posey is exceptional as the poster child for ADHD and confused libido combined; Brooke Shields is a hoot as a ditzy airhead; and Jeremy Northam is romantic as her devoted husband. All the women's smoking is obnoxious though; it's so pointed that I imagine it's a retro film thing -- but why only the three women? 4.5 stars.