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.
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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…
“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.
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
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!
“It's my mother's house and she owns it. She wanted the people she wanted in it, and she didn't want the people that I wanted in it.”
The cultural footprint of Grey Gardens shouldn’t be underestimated. This cinematic curio has been embraced by queer culture in addition to inspiring parodies and recreations perhaps more widely seen than the original documentary itself. Rich with quirk, Grey Gardens exists as an idiosyncratic nonfiction so characteristically comedic that it truly feels stranger than fiction. The very sight of “Big” and “Little” Edie Bouvier Beale in their decrepit mansion evokes the delusion and decay of Great Expectation’s Miss Havisham.
The very nature of Grey Gardens raise important questions of ethics in documentary-filmmaking. “Big” and…
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.
