GREY GARDENS
US, 1975, 100 minutes, Colour.
Edith Bouvier Beale, Edith ‘Little Edie’ Bouvier Beale, Brooks Hyers.
Voice of Norman Vincent Peale.
Directed by Ellen Hovde and Albert Maysles.
Grey Gardens is a celebrated documentary about the eccentric life of Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Little Edie. Maysles visited the mother and daughter in the 1970s and filmed interviews with them. The film captures their eccentricity in manner, dress, squalor. It traces back during the interviews the history of Edith Bouvier Beale and her marriage, her divorce, her feeling abandoned. It also focuses on Little Edie and her ambitions to be a singer, the treatment by her father, her living a reclusive life with her mother. Their gardener also appears and is interviewed.
The film is a look at a wealthy American family and its downfall. The film is sympathetic towards the two women, though they themselves, especially the mother, are not particularly interested in people’s opinion of them. The film also roams around their mansion in East Hampton, by this stage of their reclusive life in decay. However, their cousin, Jacqueline Kennedy, visited them and offered to redecorate the house and restore it.
Albert Maysles was a cinematographer who worked often in collaboration with his brother David. They made a series of documentaries starting in the mid-1950s and still working in 2010, Albert Maysles to work with Oliver Stone in a documentary with Russell Brand. They have documented a great deal of American society and American life in the second part of the 20th century and beyond.
The 2009 television drama (winning Golden Globes and Emmys) directed by Michael Sucsy and co-written with director Patricia Rozema, starred Jessica Lange as the mother and Drew Barrymore as the daughter. It went back visually and thematically to the early years of the mother and daughter. By the time it reached the 1960s and 70s, it followed the visual look and the manner of interview and discussion from the Maysles’ film. The two films are complementary to each other.
