If you or I lived in a creaking house-of-horror with utilities cut-off and raccoons in the kitchen, we'd be jailed in short order. But if you're Jackie Kennedy's aunt, the rules don't apply. That is the appeal of this film, the bohemian snob-life - too good to be correct.
Grey Gardens had been an elegant mansion of East Hampton when the aunt (Edith Beale) first lived there in 1924, but it had been slowly collapsing all around her, as she divorced her husband and then invited her unmarried daughter (Little Edie) to live with her, mostly grumbling and bickering along the way, if we are to believe this documentary. And no, they were not moving out, whatever the local hygiene department said.
The producers have tried to turn it into a pantomime, and the two ladies seem happy to play up to it. Both had clearly been glamorous in their day, Little E. making sure you notice an impressive pair of pins at fifty-six, and even her mother still showing signs of good bone structure. (Plenty of lingering close-ups of early portraits serve to ram the point home further.)
But the daughter had lost her hair early-on, possibly by setting it on fire, though she claims it was alopecia, sentencing her to a lifetime in headscarves. In any case, her brand of prettiness did not mature comfortably, and she remained a visibly dissatisfied woman. Empty face. Empty life.
The time-warp aspect is deliberately dramatised, with a lot of old records (78 rpm) brought out from their sleeves, 'Tea for Two' being an over-obvious code for nostalgic listening, and the pair of them performing their own dreadful renderings of Cole Porter and Rodgers & Hammerstein.
How they stood twenty-five years of this is beyond me. I found ninety minutes of it quite enough.
Grey Gardens had been an elegant mansion of East Hampton when the aunt (Edith Beale) first lived there in 1924, but it had been slowly collapsing all around her, as she divorced her husband and then invited her unmarried daughter (Little Edie) to live with her, mostly grumbling and bickering along the way, if we are to believe this documentary. And no, they were not moving out, whatever the local hygiene department said.
The producers have tried to turn it into a pantomime, and the two ladies seem happy to play up to it. Both had clearly been glamorous in their day, Little E. making sure you notice an impressive pair of pins at fifty-six, and even her mother still showing signs of good bone structure. (Plenty of lingering close-ups of early portraits serve to ram the point home further.)
But the daughter had lost her hair early-on, possibly by setting it on fire, though she claims it was alopecia, sentencing her to a lifetime in headscarves. In any case, her brand of prettiness did not mature comfortably, and she remained a visibly dissatisfied woman. Empty face. Empty life.
The time-warp aspect is deliberately dramatised, with a lot of old records (78 rpm) brought out from their sleeves, 'Tea for Two' being an over-obvious code for nostalgic listening, and the pair of them performing their own dreadful renderings of Cole Porter and Rodgers & Hammerstein.
How they stood twenty-five years of this is beyond me. I found ninety minutes of it quite enough.