Grey Gardens (1975) The Maysles Brothers Forgotten Masterpiece resurfaces (Review)

What are the building blocks of a cult movie?  Uniqueness and a certain quotability both help, but also it needs the sense of a world to explore, an impression that every casual reference to an off-screen character or brief appearance might lead to a life as full as any of the central characters if only you could follow them.  You can see that in all sorts of cult movies, from the people mentioned in passing by Withnail, Marwood and Monty (“Raymond Duck!” “Jeff Wode!”) and, at the other end of the quality scale, the strange narrative lacunae caused by Tommy Wiseau’s ineptitude.

Surprising, then, that there are so few cult documentaries, the one genre of film where every side character really does have a rich life of their own.  Then again, few documentaries transmit that feeling as well as Grey Gardens, the Maysles brothers’ 1975 masterpiece released on Blu-Ray in the UK by the Criterion Collection.  I’ve watched it twice now, and not only am I fascinated by its two central characters ‘Big’ Edie Beale and ‘Little’ Edie Beale, but I’m also spending ludicrous portions of my waking hours wondering about Jerry, the odd-job man hanging around the Beales’ house.  Who is he?  How did he enter the Beales’ orbit?  Where is he now?

Grey Gardens is a shrewd choice for Criterion’s UK launch, not only because of its quality – though it is superb – but because the label was so instrumental in establishing the film’s reputation.  Prior to the film’s 2006 Region 1 release, it was less a cornerstone of the documentary canon, more a secret handshake.  References to it appeared in Steven Meisel photoshoots and Rufus Wainwright albums, and (as evidenced by two Maysles-shot interviews with fashion designers on this disc) it was passed around on umpteenth-generation bootlegs among fashion designers, drag queens and anyone else fascinated by the contradictory mix of raw pain and high theatricality the Beales exhibit.

Big Edie and Little Edie are mother and daughter, living in a ruined 28-room mansion in East Hampton.  They came to national prominence when the local health department raided their property, something Little Edie calls, with characteristic understatement, “the most appalling, disgusting thing that ever happened in America.”  The fascination initially came from the fact that Big Edie, living in squalor, was the aunt of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, then arguably the most famous woman in the world.  On its release, Grey Gardens was scoured for relevance to the ongoing Kennedy-Onassis soap opera, but now this global obsession has largely disappeared the spotlight is on the Beales, as it deserves to be.

Big Edie, lying in bed underneath one of her enormous hats and belting out selections from the Rodgers and Hammerstein songbook, is incredible enough, but her daughter is impossible to take your eyes off.  Little Edie makes her entrance explaining her unique fashion sense, whispers to the camera when she seems to want to say something off the record, and never misses a chance to dance or play to the camera.  The Maysles brothers practiced “direct cinema”, popularly referred to as a “fly on the wall” documentary style, and they were sometimes criticised for presenting their films in a manner that allowed the viewer to forget there was a camera crew present.  Doesn’t the viewer deserve to be reminded that there are other people present, ran the argument, that nobody acts exactly the same when they’re on camera as they do when they’re not being filmed?

From this angle, the Beales were the Maysles’s perfect subjects, because it’s easy to imagine them acting exactly like this when there’s no-one present.  There seems to be no difference in how they behave around a film crew and how they act around Jerry the handyman.  There is also a strange timelessness around Grey Gardens; in an audio interview presented among the extras, Little Edie says the bulk of the filming was done across six weeks, but looking at the film you wouldn’t be surprised to hear the shoot was ten times longer or ten times shorter.  The only visible marker of time seems to be the slow disintegration of one of the house’s walls, which is explained in the disc’s second feature, 2006’s The Beales of Grey Gardens, as the result of a small fire.

The Beales of Grey Gardens is less a sequel than a remix, made of out-takes from the original shoot. It’s a testament to how fascinating the Beales are that this second film is almost as good as the first, despite being more slowly paced.  It allows more glimpses of the Maysles at work, being photographed by Big Edie and praised by Little Edie.  Grey Gardens was sometimes accused of exploiting its subjects, and some scenes in the main feature – Little Edie feeding the raccoons in the attic while Big Edie yells something from her bed, for instance – do have a Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? feel to them.  But The Beales of Grey Gardens shows the Maysles as welcome guests of their subjects, and Little Edie’s moments of Maysles fangirlishness seem utterly sincere.

As well they should be.  The level of craft the Maysles display in Grey Gardens is matched only by their humility – allowing editors Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer co-authorial credit, for example, at a time when most other American directors were high on the ego boost of auteur theory.  Albert Maysles, in particular, lives up to Jean-Luc Godard’s description of him as the best American cinematographer, conjuring up images of colourful, wistful beauty out of a necessarily chaotic shoot.  On first encounter, the sheer bigness of the personalities involved can make Grey Gardens feel overwhelming, but it’s worth sticking with it to the end, if only to see how the apparent matter-of-fact journalistic quality of the Maysles’s art can become truly haunting.

Thanks for reading our review of Grey Gardens

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