Greg Mottola in Talks To Direct THE MARRIAGE PLOT
Superbad and Paul director Greg Mottola is in talks to adapt a novel from Jeffrey Eugenides called The Marriage Plot for the big screen. This is definitely a different kind of film for Mottola. The story is described as a coming-of-age love triangle that takes place in the early 1980s, and focuses on a "bookish English major caught up in the affections of two men. As the romance of her favorite 19th century love stories begins to seep into her own life, the trio move from college to the real world."
I've enjoyed Mottola's films over the years, and I'm sure he'll do a fine job with this. I'm just not how much interest many of you will have in it. Is this something you'd watch?
Here's the description of the book:
It’s the early 1980s. The country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.
As Madeleine tries to understand why “it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France,” real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead—charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy—suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old “friend” Mitchell Grammaticus—who’s been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange—resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.
Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can’t escape the secret responsible for Leonard’s seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.