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Grey Gardens
Screening: Monday 8 May, 6:30pm
USA
1975
Directors: Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer
Production co: Portrait Films
Producers: Albert Maysles, David Maysles
Cinematography: Albert Maysles, David Maysles
Editors: Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer, Susan Froemk
Sound: Lee Dichter
Edith Bouvier Beale
Edith B. Beale Jnr
Jerry Torre
Lois Wright
Jack Helmuth
Brooks Hire
95 mins
DVD (1.33:1)
M cert
ADMISSION STRICTLY MEMBERS ONLY
In the mid-'70s, a scandal in East Hampton became a great embarrassment to Jacqueline Onassis. Her aunt Edith Bouvier Beale and cousin Edie Beale were discovered living in a dirt-encrusted mansion where their cats were given free rein to urinate anywhere. The health department threatened eviction unless something was done to clean the place up. Hard Copy would have been all over the story if it happened today. Back then, the only cameras to encamp belonged to filmmakers David and Albert Maysles. Their creepy 1976 documentary about the Beales, appropriately named Grey Gardens, has been rereleased. If anything, it seems even creepier now that the elder Beale has passed on to a brighter garden in the sky.
Watching the film is like being at a freak show: You feel like a voyeur, yet you can't take your eyes off this Mommie Dearest or her childlike middle-aged daughter. The Maysles, who made Salesman and Gimme Shelter and are credited with inventing cinema verite, seemed instinctively to know that the interest would be in the Beales rather than the decay surrounding them. Very little of their 28-room flophouse appears on film, though there is an amusing panoramic shot of the immaculately groomed mansions in the neighborhood. When the camera finally settles on the Beales' residence, which is in serious need of a gardener as well as housekeeper, it's like: Pick the house that doesn't belong.
Grey Gardens takes on elements of a mystery as the audience tries to figure out how the Beales, with their high-society roots and blue blood, ever came to this. The answer, or rather answers, unfold slowly. Photos, frayed with age, attest to both women's beauty in their youth. Allusions are made to disappointments in love. Apparently, Edith's husband left her for a younger woman. But this happens to lots of women, and they don't end up living in squalor. The sad fact is that neither Beale seems to have all her marbles. This may explain why they agreed to be the subjects of such a revealing documentary and raises a disturbing question: Were the filmmakers exploiting them? It's hard to dwell on that, though, seeing how much fun the two women seem to be having. Born hams, they hog the camera and fight each other for screen time, sometimes pleading their case to the Maysles. (Although Grey Gardens often is cited as a prime example of cinema verite, the filmmakers are too much a part of the proceedings for it to qualify.)
Edith, who studied voice as a young woman, belts out some show tunes, sounding remarkably strong for a woman going on 80. Edie, who was 55 when the film was shot, does a seductive dance routine showing a lot of well-toned leg. Ninety-five minutes of nonstop Beales gets to be wearing. But there's an upside: Anybody who thinks their relatives are crazy will realize it could be worse. - Ruthe Steine, San Francisco Chronicle
The unbelievable but true story of Mrs. Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edie, aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, recluses who live in the decaying 28-room East Hampton mansion known as Grey Gardens, a place so derelict that the local authorities once threatened to evict them for violating building and sanitation codes. The incident made national headlines American royalty, living in squalor! "Little Edie", once an aspiring actress of striking beauty, put her New York life on hold to care for her mother, but then never left her side again. Together they descended into a strange life of dependence and eccentricity. - Chicago International Documentary Festival
One of the greatest documentaries ever made...less a celebrity expose than a kind of love story: a record of the powerful, complex and contradictory relationship between a mother and her daughter. - Edinburgh International Film Festival
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