Grey Gardens - Criterion Collection

Rating:
Summary: Finally!
Review: It is such an amazing story to watch. It is unbelievable that these are the same women we are shown in the old photographs. After seeing it dozens of times, I still wish someone would do a companion piece that traces in detail their downfall into squallor. What events lead two people to accepting such conditions for their life? It is a jaw-dropping shocker and you can't take your eyes off the screen. A classic.

Rating:
Summary: It's Not Easy Being Rich
Review: It's amazing to see how bizarre the life of a "celebrity" family can unfold. Related to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, the once gorgeous Edith, who sounds remarkably like her cousin Jackie, is as imprisoned in her own psyche and that of her aging, curmudgeonly mother, as she thinks she is in their run-down East Hampton onetime summer mansion, Grey Gardens.
The film is fascinating in its strangeness.

Rating:
Summary: Absorbing
Review: It's like watching a train wreck - you're repulsed, and yet you can't look away. A fascinating look at the inter-relationship of a mother and daughter bonded together by fate and apathy. Glimpses of what were and what could have been pepper this documentary, while the camera records the decay of the house, as well as the decay of the lives of the Beales. "Little Edie" gained a cult following which exists to this day, and this film will go down as a classic. It's weird, it's disturbing, it's a must-see.

Rating:
Summary: Norma Desmond eat your heart out!
Review: Norma times 2! Norma to the second power! This is the 1970's reality Sunset Boulevard...truth is stranger than fiction. This is the Kennedy relation that is actually interesting and unpredictable. Sunset Boulevard meets Postcards from the Edge meets 'night Mother! A MUST SEE-MUST OWN!!!! Will make you feel saner than ever!

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating look at Dysfunction
Review: Once you see this film you are hooked. It's as if Little Edie and Big Edie take over your senses. Perhaps one of the oddest films I've ever seen. Intially I didn't even know what to think..truly a bizarre slice of life these two women. It should not be missed.

Rating:
Summary: Plain, pathetic pair up close
Review: One needs to be sold somewhat on the mythology of blue blood, perhaps, to find this movie so fantastic. I am not.
A documentation of two fallen aristocratic beauties living out their quite [boring] lives is little unlike one of average folks doing the same. Their missed opportunities may be larger than for common folk, but their internecine bickering is as banal as what you'd hear in any trailer park. It adds up to little more than a common story of a mother and daughter stuck in an ugly rut.
It's made only marginally more interesting by their living in squalor in what might in other circumstances be a fabulous mansion on prime sea-side real estate.
A bit more exposition on the Kennedy-Onassis connection or on the two principals' times of hope in their youth might have heightened the interest somewhat.
As portrayed, the daughter is a singularly unsympathetic character who has been poisoned by privelege - a phenomenon the bluebloods have no corner on. The mother is familiarly resigned.
On the plus side, the Maysles brothers succeed in getting an intimate portrait, which is no easy feat anywhere. For contrast, I'd say Zwigoff's "Crumb" is more intimate and manages to look at its subject from multiple angles, unlike here.

Rating:
Summary: stunning
Review: One of the most brilliant films ever made. you'll want to move in to Grey Gardens.

Rating:
Summary: stunning
Review: One of the most brilliant films ever made. you'll want to move in to Grey Gardens.

Rating:
Summary: how grey was my garden...
Review: Personal tragedy, extreme eccentricity and isolation are the ties that bind an elderly mother and her aging daughter to their decrepit estate in the Hamptons. Edith Bouvier (the daughter) is first cousin to Jackie Bouvier aka Jackie Kennedy but something bad has happened to this side of the pedigree. The money seems to have run out, the house in sympathy with the general state of affairs is in rapid decline and taking the grounds with it. The women, ostracized by the Hampton elite, must feed off each other for companionship telling the same stories, expressing the same pain over and over - until that is the film crew shows up. Edith (a woman in her 60's) begins to blossom, flirt and dance with and for the camera. Having a fresh audience Edith, inbetween costume changes, coyly tells the camera her family secrets. While the mother, also named Edith, lays in bed with her numerous cats and tells a different tale. Rather then take you out of their world the camera crew acts as a liaison between the cloistral world of mother and daughter. Grey Gardens is the reason I love documentary film making - for the pure voyeuristic pleasure of people watching.

Rating:
Summary: Grey Gardens--Splendid Documentary from the Maysles Bros.
Review: Possibly the greatest documentary every made, this film displays the glorious and rancorous daily life of Edith Bouvier Beale (79) and her daughter "little Edie" (56) in their crumbling 28 room mansion in East Hampton. Mother and daughter are the aunt and first cousin of the famous Bouvier, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and live a perverse and destitute existence surrounded by resident incontinent cats, wild racoons, and the odd handyman. Little Edie has turned her back on New York Society Life to live with her mother by the ocean. The two are caught in a fabulously claustrophobic love-hate drama that is enlivened by their odd choice in food (liver pate and ice cream) and Little Edie's fashion parade of window treatments transformed into turbans and sweaters reborn as skirts.