Subjecting marigolds to radiation, in the central metaphor of the film, Matilda manages to grow something beautiful despite difficult conditions. The cumulation of the story that shows the ugly schism between Beatrice's dashed dreams and her daughters' tentative hopes for the future is the science fair for which shy, delicate Matilda has created an experiment with the help of her doting science teacher Mr.
Their income comes from Beatrice's phone solicitations on behalf of a local dance school and the depressing wages of taking in the elderly and sickly, including new arrival Nanny (Judith Lowry), a pitifully frail old woman who has been rejected by her own self-centered businesswoman daughter Mrs. Abandoned by their father and Beatrice's husband years ago, the family of three women is stranded and desperate. Beatrice takes out her life's frustrations on her daughters, cruelly complaining about Matilda's beloved pet rabbit and threatening to keep them home from school for housecleaning. A disappointed woman who harbors delusional fantasies of opening a tea house and other grand schemes, Beatrice spends her time demeaning the two members of her household who have hopes of a better life, her young daughters Ruth (Roberta Wallach), whose anxiety results in epileptic seizures and fragile, brilliant Matilda (Nell Potts) who has a gift for science. Her home is a decaying disaster area and she lives some alternate dream of what could be by reading the classified ads. In an economically depressed sliver of a Northern American town defined by crumbling, once noble Victorian homes, lives Beatrice Hunsdorfer (Joanne Woodward) a damaged matriarch lording over her sad, broken family.
A brutal, intense, but rewarding adaptation of young adult novelist Paul Zindel's 1971 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972) is directed and produced by Paul Newman starring his wife Joanne Woodward.
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