I'm not the only one who wants to move to New York City. Little Edie has been threatening to do just that since moving in with her her mother for 24 years ago. Of course she never will. At 55, she'll continue to practice her dance routines in the front hall while her mother yowls out 1930s showtunes from her filthy, cat-covered bed upstairs.All this is strictly routine at Grey Gardens, a rotting, 28 room mansion in the Hamptons, surrounded by an almost impenetrable thicket of overgrown trees and bushes.
Playing out like some kind of Tennessee Williams nightmare on the eastern seaboard, Grey Gardens, the cult documentary film from 1976, has two film makers silently following Little Edie Bouvier Beale, Jackie O's first cousin (the aforementioned showtune singing mother was Jackie's aunt), around for six weeks.
And what a six weeks it is. With the emotional maturity of a 13 year old girl, Little Edie both delights and disturbs with her bizarre fashion sense, her manic ramblings about "the Marble Faun", and, best of all, her dance recitals. In what feels eerily like a real-life Glass Menagerie, she also tells us about a line of beaus, each of whom proposed to her but were driven away (in 15 minutes flat) by her domineering mother.
Meanwhile, bedridden Mad Mama Bouvier-Beale sits upstairs, cooking pots of corn on the free range by her bed, feeding their eight cats liver pate (It needs a little lemon--it's not awfully good), cackling, screaming for Edie, and singing loudly along with the scratchy old phonograph, attempting to relive her bygone days as a chanteuse.
Of course, these faded relics of American aristocrazy are only able to feign politeness for the filmmakers for so long. It's only a matter of time before the two women begin going at each other with the fierceness of all eight pate-eating cats put together. That's when the fun really begins--when the tensions run embarrassingly high and the truth behind these women's retreat from the outside world creeps to the surface.
It's tragic. It's hilarious. It's like a horrible car wreck or a beached whale. You can't help but marvel at this horror. If you don't roll over on your couch at the 45 minute mark and slur, "I need a drink to get through this" you're made of tougher stuff than I am. The optional DVD commentary by various Hollywood filmmakers and designers attempts to elevate the two bickering protagonists to some sort of tragic artist level--they're tortured geniuses, frustrated by their unrealized potential.
I guess if you consider feeding whole bags of Wonder Bread and puppy chow to the family of raccoons that live in your walls to be a hallmark of repressed artistic expression then sure, these two ladies make Isadora Duncan look like a C student. But for the rest of us who are a bit more willing to cast our pretentions aside, the analysis of these woman can be summed up simply: these bitches is crazy.
Despite all that, the film is totally mezmerizing. And, seeing as how it's headed for Broadway in musical form this fall and a film remake (of a documentary??) is scheduled for 2007 with Jessica Lange and the talentless Drew Barrymore, you might as well track this baby down and see what all the fuss is about. As Little Edie would say, you'll be pulverized by this thing. And that's very good. * * *
Little Edie in the "best costume for the day"
