Grey Gardens

So the other night (lucky me!) I won the chance to see a preview screening of the upcoming HBO film entitled Grey Gardens. For those of you not familiar, there is a documentary of the same name in existence that was filmed in the early 1970s. The documentary films and interviews a mother and daughter who are in fact aunt and cousin to Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Bottom line? These two ladies have gone a bit mad living together with virtually no other human contact (and an excessive amount of feline contact).

The HBO film takes the idea a bit further than the doc and explores the lives of these two women before they went crazy, so to speak, and intertwines it with reenactments of the documentary. Drew Barrymore plays the daughter, "little" Edie (Edith) Beale, and Jessica Lange plays the mother, "big" Edie Beale. Both play their parts very well; Barrymore is surprisingly good, in fact (surprising because although I like her, her strive to accomplish dramatic roles is always a bit amusing to me). In spite of my skepticism, Barrymore plays little Edie with passion, compassion and life.

The Edies made for a very intriguing and somewhat appalling news story soon after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The world learned that these two women, once wealthy and pampered by Mr. Beale, were living in squalor in their formerly beautiful summer home, Grey Gardens. It was quite the scandal because Cousin Jackie was such a prominet American figure. However, the film reveals that it was Jackie who helped them out of their state and to survive from then on.

What is most provocative about this film is its exploration of wealth and being "kept." Big Edie was a woman of the 1920s, very accustomed to her husband's money and status and confident that she was indestructible. What she did not count on, however, was the Great Depression coupled with the fact that someday she may have to fend for herself--which in fact she had no idea how to do. Little Edie, as a result of her mother's overprotection, found herself much in the same boat. Their relationship is a dysfunctional but loving one, somewhat like a married couple who has spent entirely too many years with one another.

I don't want to give the entire story away--any of this you could read in a summary--but the film is very well done and interesting. It's a great story and I highly recommend the documentary as well. (Side note: believe it or not, the story of little and big Edie has also been made into a musical!) Grey Gardens premieres on HBO this Saturday, April 18th, at 8pm.