Grey Gardens

Grey Gardens (2009 film)

• Directors: Ellen Hovde; Albert Maysles; David Maysles; Muffie Meyer
• AMG Rating:
• Genre: Culture & Society
• Movie Type: Interpersonal Relationships, Social Issues
• Themes: Misfits and Outsiders, Mothers and Daughters, Eccentric Families
• Release Year: 1976
• Country: US
• Run Time: 94 minutes

Plot

Albert and David Maysles, pioneers in the cinéma vérité movement of documentary filmmaking, chose for their subjects of this film a mother and daughter with celebrity connections. Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edie (or, as they are called by the brothers, Big Edie and Little Edie), are aunt and cousin to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. In the early '70s, their 28-room mansion in Long Island's tony community of East Hampton was found to be a health hazard, and the two women, in their seventies and fifties, were threatened with eviction. Jacqueline Onassis paid for the house to be put in good order, and two years later, the Maysles paid the ladies a series of follow-up visits. This is not fly-on-the-wall filmmaking; the brothers are sometimes shown on-camera, and both women talk directly to them. Big Edie reminisces about her husband (from whom she has long been separated) and her youthful singing career; Little Edie ruminates over memories of her thwarted romances and confides that she has to get out of Grey Gardens (the name of their estate), although she has been living there since 1952; and the two women pick at each other for transgressions past and present. The women share their home with at least five cats and several raccoons, for whom Little Edie leaves out food in the attic. They are not recluses; they host a modest 79th birthday party for Big Edie, they employ a gardener, and they are often visited by Jerry, a young handyman/lost soul whom Little Edie calls "the Marble Faun," after the Nathaniel Hawthorne story. "It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present," Little Edie says near the beginning of the film, and it becomes clear that both women are much more comfortable reliving their respective youths (in some ways, Little Edie has never left hers) than facing their rather bleak old and middle age. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide

Review

Although Salesman (their breakthrough film) and Gimme Shelter (their most accessible film) are better known in the canon of Maysles brothers' movies, arguably their most moving film is this portrait of two aging women stuck in time and locked in a mother-daughter relationship for the ages. Edith Beale and Edie Beale are related to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, which presumably brought them to the attention of the Maysles when the women were almost evicted from their rundown mansion on Long Island. But the Kennedy connection is really only incidental; this could be any mother and daughter whose past lives of wealth and privilege are all they have to go on in their respective old and middle age. The third character here is their house, slowly succumbing to age and neglect, but, especially for Big Edie, the supreme symbol of her once glorious past. The film is both heartbreaking and unexpectedly funny. Little Edie (as the filmmakers call her) loves confiding to the camera, and her sense of fashion (which runs to interesting head wraps and inverted skirts) and her way with words make her an endlessly entertaining subject, even as you sense the desperation beneath her dancing and singing routines and her whispered monologues. The film's most common image -- of Little Edie confiding to the Maysles that she has to get out of Grey Gardens while her mother calls her from another room to come and help her -- goes beyond even the specificity of wealth gone to ruin. What middle-aged offspring of an aging and needy parent hasn't experienced the same tug of emotions? ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide

Cast

Edie Beale; Edith Bouvier Beale

Credit

Susan Froemke - Associate Producer, Ellen Hovde - Director, Albert Maysles - Director, David Maysles - Director, Muffie Meyer - Director, Ellen Hovde - Editor, Muffie Meyer - Editor, Susan Froemke - Editor, Albert Maysles - Cinematographer, David Maysles - Cinematographer, Lee Dichter - Sound/Sound Designer