Blu-ray Review: Cinema Vérité Classic Grey Gardens on the Criterion Collection

The intimacy and personal interactions of Grey Gardens changed the course of documentary filmmaking.

Grey GardensSarah Polley’s recent documentary Stories We Tell dances coyly around its central thesis of how family members construct their own narratives in a way that best suits their own individual interests. Though she doesn’t portray herself as having any real clue about what the point of her project will be, Polley’s ensemble “cast” of parents and siblings help her come to the understanding that it’s the variations of those stories, not the coherences, that actually form their collective bond. While Stories We Tell may not have been directly influenced by the cult documentary Grey Gardens, the conclusions Polley reaches go a long way toward appreciating the destructive but symbiotic dynamic shared by Big Edie and Little Edie Bouvier, not to mention the fascination their cautionary tale has held among the gay community, many of whom (to borrow a chestnut from a recent episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race) had to choose their own families.

“It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present,” the flamboyantly dotty Little Edie muses at one point during the film, while not engaged in a battle royale against or maybe in collusion with her equally theatrical mother. As filmed by verité-lite documentarians Albert and David Maysles (famous for Salesman and the Stones-at-Altamont chronicle Gimme Shelter), Little and Big Edie Beale née Bouvier are natural performers, and seemingly all too happy to allow two gentlemen callers into their crumbling Hamptons estate to capture them whiling away the seasons, singing along to Big Edie’s recordings of “Tea for Two,” selecting “the perfect costume for the day,” which often involves wearing sweaters as skirts and skirts as saharianes. Both are to some degree haunted by a past that has stripped them of their ability to live in the present. Their total neglect for maintaining their living environment characterizes them as proto-hoarders, but of memories, not possessions. In fact, they’ve whittled their living space down to just a few small rooms from what was once a palatial blue-blood estate, huddled in their side-by-side twin beds, surrounded by hundreds of felines and a family or two of raccoons Little Edie leaves Kibbles ‘N’ Bits for in the attic.

“In the Hamptons, they can get you for wearing red shoes on a Thursday,” Little Edie sneers at one point, only slightly keeping the line between eccentricity and insanity. Given the lack of guile either reveal in front of the cameras they’ve invited into their home, it’s not clear whether the Beales have fashioned their lifestyle in conscious defiance of their conservative neighbors or if they truly are blasé about sleeping atop a mottled mélange of newspaper clippings, corn husks, and cat urine. Could their Lysol-ignorant situation be an outgrowth of depression over the men they lost in their lives? (Decades prior, Big Edie’s husband obtained a divorce in Mexico, which she claims the Catholic Church won’t recognize, and more than once Little Edie obsesses over the dreamboat her mother chased away.) Or were they proto-feminists who chased the men away deliberately? One of the underlying themes of the film is that their chosen caste of allies includes mainly gay men, such as Big Edie’s accompanist of yore or their drop-in handyman Jerry, a flea-bitten soul who seems to have stepped right out of a Paul Morrissey tableau. Conversely, one of the other undercurrents of the film involves Little Edie’s needy flirtations with the younger David Maysles, her coquettish looks directly into the camera breaking down the filmmakers’ tenuous objectivity and turning the filmmakers gaze back on themselves.

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Beyond her push-pull relationship with men, it’s not difficult to see how Little Edie’s constantly flowing interjections, overripe with camp bon mots (“I’m just pulverized by this latest thing,” “All I have to do is find this Libra man,” “S-T-A-U-N-C-H”), have attracted the devotion of gay audiences. Perhaps they recognize the power of monologue to deflect inquiries into the actual truth of the matter, the painful realities that spur alternate narratives. A strong point of comparison could be made between some of Little Edie’s most desperate moments and the drunken unraveling of the gay hustler in the spotlight of Shirley Clarke’s one-man Portrait of Jason. Both staunch characters interpolate performance into their lives to the point of dissociation. At least when there’s a camera around to catch their fall.

The Maysles and the Beales are equally culpable in giving the film its goon-show edge, which undoubtedly accounts for its pull on some audiences (critic Peter Keough astutely pinned the film’s tone somewhere between Ionesco and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?). But they also captured one of the most compelling mother-daughter dyads ever seen on film. They’re co-dependent, but their humble existence conveys the full weight of generations passing unto the next; there but for the grace of God go them. And the Maysles wisely opted to not allow in any external, objective information about what truly happened to bring the Edies to their present state. Their account is what counts, and Grey Gardens remains one of the greatest and possibly only disaster movies that clearly benefits from not having seen the moments of reaping.

Image/Sound

Grey Gardens was shot on the fly with highly mobile equipment, which resulted in very intimate moments but also very muddy, grainy images. Which, of course, are all the better to capture the wilted grandeur of Big Edie and Little Edie Bouvier’s own personal Satis House. The colors appear a great deal more natural on Blu-ray than they did on Criterion’s earlier DVD issue, and the image appears to have eliminated a great deal of overscan in the previous transfer. It’s obviously nothing even remotely close to a showroom disc (especially the muted, mono soundtrack), but as far as representing its source, it couldn’t be finer.

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Extras

The juiciest bonus feature, and the one most likely to just pulverize fans of the film, is the recently released “sequel” doc The Beales of Grey Gardens, collated entirely from footage not used in the original film. While it’s not as coherent or direct as the 1975 documentary, The Beales does shed quite a bit more light on Little Edie’s true feelings about David Maysles (it’s almost uncomfortable at times to witness the blatant plays she makes for his attention) as well as her participation in creating a scene of her own life, as when she howls for the just-arriving brothers to help her extinguish a fire it seems very likely she set herself. The remainder of the bonus features were available on the previous Criterion set, including an illuminating commentary between all the filmmakers, minus Maysles (who died in 1987), and an extensive, invaluable audio interview with Little Edie conducted in the wake of the film’s release.

Overall

More than the revolutionary costume of the day, the intimacy and personal interactions of Grey Gardens changed the course of documentary filmmaking.

Score: 
 Cast: Edith "Big Edie" Ewing Bouvier Beale, Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale, Jerry Torre, Brooks Hyers, Jack Helmuth, Lois Wright  Director: Ellen Hovde, Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Muffie Meyer  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 110 min  Rating: PG  Year: 1975  Release Date: December 10, 2013  Buy: Video

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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