1975 Directed by Albert Maysles, David Maysles …
Edie Bouvier Beale and her mother, Edith, two aging, eccentric relatives of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, are the sole inhabitants of a Long Island estate. The women reveal themselves to be misfits with outsized, engaging personalities. Much of the conversation is centered on their pasts, as mother and daughter now rarely leave home.
after watching this documentary on repeat for 3 days straight, i was inspired to update my linkedin profile, move out of my parents’ house, and throw my cat away! with the grey gardens program, YOU TOO can get your life together!!!
watching this now is like watching ghosts making a movie about ghosts trapped in a house haunted by ghosts
“It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. You know what I mean? It’s awfully difficult.”
A person of a certain social station, when exhibiting outré behavior, is referred to as “eccentric.” Were her name “Smith” or “Jones,” she would be carted off to a room with cushioned wallpaper. But if her name is “Bouvier Beale,” she has the advantage of being left alone.
Then again, she also has the disadvantage of being left alone. She certainly doesn’t live in the present, but she doesn’t quite live in the past either. She lives in an alternate reality. That line between the past and the present has become a Möbius strip of recollections and performances and…
Decaying luxury sprawls in internal(ized) squalor. Both Edies are trapped, bitter, nostalgic, regretful, in love with a time and place, in love with dreams deferred or lost or warped by years of neglect and repression. There is love between them, but it is the choked, stripped love of two people chafing at the other's presence. It is difficult not to have sympathy for them, even though it's equally hard not to think of how they came into their money and power, how that has protected them even as they live in refuse, how others have been harmed by the avarice inherent in their lifestyles; these two women are seemingly guileless in their needs and strengths. It seems strange to think they were exploited--they were said to have loved the movie even if they were not paid everything they were promised--but it's hard to watch anyone experience pain and not wonder why those with the cameras do nothing.
52 project: 102/52
“france fell but edie didn’t fall.”
sometimes you just have to dump an entire bag of wonder bread onto the floor so the raccoon family that has invaded your dilapidated long island mansion doesn’t eat you and your mother in your sleep.
58/100
Gotta say I'm leaning toward exploitative on this, mostly because the film doesn't reveal anything new as it goes along, merely offering more (admittedly mesmerizing) examples of the Edies' eccentricity. I haven't seen The Beales of Grey Gardens, but would be willing to bet it's essentially the same movie, in the sense that it, too, likely amounts to a formless collection of private performances by two women who are clearly at least in the general ballpark of mental illness. Would a feature-length documentary portrait of, say, compulsive hoarders be considered kosher today? A film that doesn't in any way interrogate them, but merely spends 90 minutes or so documenting how they live? (One may exist, for all I know.)…
"She's actually got a lovely voice" - Big Edie,
Corn on the cob is best served bedside.
Watch this and learn to live again!!!! Grey Gardens is one of the most terrifying and amazing films ever made. It's documentation of Little and Big Edie's eccentric and impoverished life is a wakeup calls for those with a tendency to live in the past. Yes they are both fucking icons now but they also had potential that went unfulfilled because of their codependency and series of other associative disorders.
I love it. Watch it. Just do it!
Little Edie is everything I could dream of being honestly! A fashionable, cat-loving, philosophizing recluse wasting away with unfulfilled potential and a codependent relationship with her mother.
This documentary is hilarious and I can see why it has the cult status it does because it’s so eccentric and quotable.
But oh man is it tragic. To see these women looking back on their lives filled only with regret. To see them lavishly living in a decaying house, watching the world move on without them. To see them become living ghosts stuck forever in the life they never had.
Criterion Collection Spine #123
A revealing look into the lives of a pair of former upper-class women, that allowed their status to erode into becoming eccentric, crazy cat ladies, who live together in filth.
(Note: I feel bad saying that since I don’t like to judge people, but that's most of what we have to talk about here with Grey Gardens.)
"Come on in. We're not ready."
The fact that I don't like watching trashy reality TV is the same reason why I thought it was a real drag to sit through Grey Gardens. IMO it is really more of a glorified home movie, which left me wondering the whole time why this is such an acclaimed documentary. After listening…
"Everyone thinks and feels different as the years go by don't they?"
-Edith
Nobody plans to grow up to live in a dusty, broken down museum of their own failures but sometimes it happens anyways.
Grey Gardens is the profoundly influential documentary which follows the daily lives of two former socialites Edith Bouvier Beale and Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale. The mother and daughter, cousins of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, live in a decrepit mansion with highly limited funds and spend every day in a dirty house snarking at each other about failed opportunities from decades earlier.
Growing older is tough because at some point most people need to re-calibrate and readjust to the life they have, as opposed to the life…
i dont usually give documentaries a star rating but this is so good. also this is how me and my mom act irl
this movie is really beautiful, but mostly it’s disturbing
all I could think about while watching was the documentary now episode
This is less a documentary and more a gothic horror story about two poltergeists haunting a dilapidated mansion. I found it an extremely claustrophobic, isolating, overwhelming, and depressing viewing experience. This is why I watch fiction, reality is too stressful for me.
Very much a laugh or cry type of movie.
It’s so extremely saddening to watch people so caught up in the past, like they’re ghosts that just haven’t died yet, haunting this house that’s falling apart as the evidence of their previously-affluent lifestyle rots around them in cat shit and raccoon nests. The two women sing and dance almost obliviously, in between their bitter sniping back and forth at each other about how their lives have turned out.
GOD this was good though. If there’s any takeaway from this, it’s gotta be to let go of the past, because all it does is stagnate like a mansion eaten by kudzu. If you let yourself dwell too long in it, you’ll be strangled as well.
+ Tell me you’ve ever seen two people who are like the mom and daughter in this film? Go ahead, I’ll wait… although probably not long because the world is filled with interesting people. Anyway, Grey Gardens is an incredibly interesting, intimate, and at points intense deep dive onto a slice of life of two inseparable, isolated people! (Holy I-Alliteration Batman!) Yeah, there is no other way I could start talking about this film other than with the subjects living within the titular Grey Gardens: the mother & daughter pair of Edith and Edie Bouvier Beale. As I mentioned up top, these are two incredibly unique individuals with such a unique, yet oddly understandable situation living in a house where stuff…
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