Grey Gardens

I saw this doc many years ago on TV and had a recent viewing.

It's still challenging to watch it without enormous compassion for these obviously disturbed, mentally ill mother and daughter duo living in squalor and filth in a dilapidated old mansion on the coast. The aunt and cousin of the late Jackie Onassis.

Cats and racoons run amok in this horror of a place (and I understand it was cleaned before the film makers came to intrude and document the lives of the two women.

This time I found it exploitive. Today (not back then) we recognize that hoarding and living in such appalling surroundings, no running water, holes in the walls, cat urine, eating cat food (they spread it on crackers) is a sign of severe mental illness.

Edith and Edie are immune to it all, savouring the past - they were beauties in their time - and have a passive agressive endless argument going with each other. Clothing is optional.

Edie wears blouses and sweaters tied up around her head due to skin condition of baldness.

Like a train wreck, it's impossible to look away but I am shocked that a health department wasn't called in to fumigate and rescue these two.

A huge level of exploitation by the two brothers who filmed it all and the final insult was in not putting the names of the women in the credits.

They were used in their utmost vulnerability.

One question that must be asked immediately is: Would this film have been made if the women in it were not the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis?

The answer is: Probably not.

But, thankfully, they are (or were) the cousin and aunt of Jackie.

This documentary by the Maysles brothers on the existence (one could hardly call it a life) of Edith B. Beale, Jr., and her daughter Edith Bouvier Beale (Edie), has the same appeal of a train wreck -- you don't want to look but you have to.

Big Edith and Little Edie live in a once magnificent mansion in East Hampton, New York, that is slowly decaying around them. The once beautiful gardens are now a jungle.

Magnificent oil painting lean against the wall (with cat feces on the floor behind them) and beautiful portraits of them as young women vie for space on the walls next to covers of old magazines.

Living alone together for many years has broken down many barriers between the two women but erected others.

Clothing is seems to be optional. Edie's favorite costume is a pair of shorts with panty hose pulled up over them and bits and pieces of cloth wrapped and pinned around her torso and head.

As Edith says "Edie is still beautiful at 56." And indeed she is. There are times when she is almost luminescent and both women show the beauty that once was there.

There is a constant undercurrent of sexual tension.

Their eating habits are (to be polite) strange. Ice cream spread on crackers. A dinner party for Edith's birthday of Wonder Bread sandwiches served on fine china with plastic utensils.

Time is irrelevant in their world; as Edie says "I don't have any clocks."

Their relationships with men are oh-so-strange.

Edie feels like Edith thwarted any of her attempts at happiness. She says "If you can't get a man to propose to you, you might as well be dead." To which Edith replies "I'll take a dog any day."

It is obvious that Edith doesn't see her role in Edie's lack of male companionship. Early in the film she states "France fell but Edie didn't.

Sometimes it is difficult to hear exactly what is being said. Both women talk at the same time and constantly contradict each other.

There is a strange relationship with animals throughout the film; Edie feeds the raccoons in the attic with Wonder Bread and cat food. The cats (and there are many of them) are everywhere.

At one point Edie declares "The hallmark of aristocracy is responsibility." But they seem to be unable to take responsibility for themselves.

This is a difficult film to watch but well worth the effort.

... such as what happened to the Bouvier/Beale money that bought the 28 room mansion that mother and daughter live in and is in disrepair? I know that Big Edie was divorced in 1931, and it sounded like "little Edie" had the advantages of an expensive education through college, which would have been right before WWII. What changed? There is no narration here, nor do the documentary makers ask questions. They just let the cameras roll and record whatever happens. Big Edie is in her late 70s yet retains a kind of beauty. However, she talks over little Edie whenever they are in the same room, making it difficult to understand either woman.

What is clear visually is that they are both living in squalor. A cat defecates behind a very old portrait of Big Edie and both Edies laugh about being glad somebody gets to do what they want? Nobody tries to clean it up. Big Edie spends her time on a filthy mattress with stuff she might need stacked on top, yet seems to have no trouble with mobility. They make food for the cameramen including pate on crackers that looks like cat food on crackers. I would want a tetanus shot first.

Little Edie has a mountain of regret. She talks about how she wanted to be a dancer, how somebody wanted to marry her but her mother drove him away, and how she has been taking care of her mother due to her health on and off since the second world war. She mentions how much she hates the country and misses the noise of the city. Little Edie is remarkably well preserved. When this film was made she was 56 but she could pass for forty. She color coordinates all of her wardrobes including her scarves and headdresses that hide her alopecia, yet she won't mop the floor. Shades of faded feelings of being aristocracy perhaps?

Another question I had that went unanswered was where were big Edie's sons? Both lived into the 1990's, yet they are nowhere to be found. Maybe they had the sense to get out of Dodge.

Why are these recluses the subject of a documentary in the first place? Because big and little Edie are Jackie Kennedy Onnasis' aunt and cousin, respectively, and because Suffolk County was trying to evict them based on the condition of the house and grounds - there was no running water at one point - until Jackie supplied the funds to get the estate up to snuff.

Don't look for lots of answers here, because there are really none. It is just a fascinating portrait of two recluses who have slipped into their own form of normality although it looks horrifying to outsiders.

I saw this film a couple of weeks ago, and it's been stuck in my head ever since. It stars two spellbinding characters in what is unfortunately a mediocre documentary. To get the true story of the Beales, I had to wade through all of the DVD's bonus material and commentaries and search the web.

Although the Maysles and their fans (not to mention Edith and Edie themselves) bristle at the suggestion that this film is exploitative, this is exploitation in the truest sense of the word. Very little effort is every made to explain the Beales or how they came to the condition they were in - the Maysles approach seems to be to just turn the camera on and wait for Edith and Edie to say something outrageous. The sound, even on the Criterion re-release is poor and difficult to follow. Although I appreciate this film was made somewhat early in the history of documentary film, it's ironic to compare it to Geraldo Rivera's (!) far superior series on the sexual abuse of mentally retarded patients at Willowbrook State School in Staten Island from 1972, four years before Grey Gardens was shot.

To paraphrase a review in the New Yorker, there were many things Edith and Edie needed in their lives, and a documentary wasn't one of them.

As for Edith and Edie, the thing I kept thinking while watching the film was "where the hell is their family"? They were living in dangerous, unhealthy, unsafe conditions. How is it that Jackie O, married to one of the richest men on Earth (or the wealthy Bouvier family themselves) couldn't afford to get Edith and Edie a decent home? Or at the very least hire a part-time housekeeper or caregiver to come in and keep an eye on them both? It's shameful and a lasting disgrace to the entire Bouvier family.

Although this review may sound negative I would strongly recommend Grey Gardens to anyone who enjoys documentaries. Perhaps someday someone will come along and do a documentary about this documentary - bringing in the rich backstory (and afterstory) of the Beales and the whole subsection of Hamptons society in the 1970's.

I took this out arbitrarily from the library the other night, having no idea of the film's cult, influence, or that it is currently being staged as a musical.(!) Most of the comments here are on target, it's moving, funny, sad, and yes, a tad exploitive despite the best intentions of the filmmakers. The expanded Chriterion edition is a must for anyone who loved it when it came out.

I think you can also see in little Edie the fall of a class that sort of disappeared, you can hear it in old films of Jackie O too; people just don't talk like that anymore. I think as a documentary, it would have been interesting to get more information about how the home fell into disrepute, Old Edie at least still seems aware of what's going on to a certain degree; couldn't She see the once spectacular home disintegrating?

Yet the film's subject is the life the two women have constructed for themselves now, a real life Tennesse Williams one act. Well worth your time.