Grey Gardens

I'm in the midst of a documentary spree. I suppose it was kick-started when I posted those clips from American Movie the other day. Last night, I watched Grey Gardens for the first time. If you don't know it, it was made by the Maysles brothers, who also made Gimme Shelter, which I found overwhelmingly dull. Gardens is great, though you might not think so from a straightforward description. It was filmed almost entirely inside the decaying mansion in East Hampton, New York, from which it took its name. The sprawling home was owned and occupied by Edith and Edie Beale, an aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy.

According to trusty Wikipedia:

In the 1970s, the First Lady's sister Lee Radziwill discussed creating a documentary with Albert and David Maysles about Jacqueline's girlhood in East Hampton. At about the same time the Edies made national attention when the National Enquirer ran an expose on the deplorable conditions in which the Beales lived. The Suffolk County, New York Board of Health made a raid, ordering them to clean up the property which was falling into disrepair and was being overrun with feral cats.

The house may have passed official muster by the time the Maysles filmed there, but it was still a mess -- spare, stained, neglected. Throughout the movie, Edie and Edith quarrel with each other, sing to each other, and recount old times to each other.

That's it. But there's enough pathos on display to cripple an army, and the Beale women turn out to be as quotable as they are seemingly crazy. (My favorite line comes when the two are looking through an old photo album. Edie was quite beautiful as a younger woman. Edith is bemoaning the fact that her daughter was never married and, after Edie makes a comment about one picture dating to around the time when Germany invaded France, Edith says, "France fell but Edie didn't fall.")

Edith is almost 80, a former singer who now (in 1975, when the movie was made) spends nearly every hour of the day in her bed, with several cats (not feral, I suppose, but plenty grimy) at her feet. Edie doesn't do much of anything, but she overdresses (given the family's lack of contact with anyone or anything, dressing at all was overdressing) and complains about how she had to come home nearly 25 years ago to care for her mother, leaving behind her dreams of success in New York. But given Edie's state of mind -- she can be sharp and funny, but she's also remarkably childlike and clearly imbalanced -- it's just as likely that she needed to come home, and that she's the one who was initially cared for in some way.

The filmmakers don't explicitly answer that or any other question about the Beales. The movie is a portrait of faded aristocracy, familial dysfunction, and hermetic life. Chances are that many of you have seen it (or at least heard of it), so I won't go on about the specifics.

Speaking more broadly, I wondered about the ethics of it. I'm glad the Maysles made it, but given how stark and lonely the women's existence was, it seemed especially invasive to have someone filming them in such intimate moments. Edie crowed about how much she loved the finished product -- it made her a cult star. (Edith died a year or two after its release.) The mother and daughter appear to have been on friendly terms with the Maysles, and I'm not making any particular accusations. But given Edie's frame of mind, I don't think that her being thrilled by the project absolves it of ethical inquiry.