A waste of 90 minutes of my life

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Not the people who star in this wanton documentary, oh no. They have souls and they pine for their pasts and they regret profoundly, the way that we all do. They simply have the misfortune of having their innermost regrets and thoughts splayed out comically for all the world to see.I felt for these women so acutely. They love each other and fit together like a favorite pair of well worn shoes, but their devotion to each other seems to have robbed them of the vibrancy that they used to posses. They bicker and poke at each other because it's all they have left of the joys of life, a life that was more than enough for the both of them until these movie makers decided to bring up 'what ifs' and 'could have beens' from the past. It just seemed so cruel to put them through it. It was also unkind the way that they present the house as a dump when, from where I'm sitting, it looks like a perfectly comfortable and homey place to live. Just because these women don't adhere to the standard of the one percent doesn't make their home--full of warmth and genuine affection, a squalor shack. I cannot get behind this famed documentary because it cruelly dramatizes the wasted hopes and past dreams of a mother and daughter who lived, by any standards, a full life. Cruelty should not be regarded as art.

... such as what happened to the Bouvier/Beale money that bought the 28 room mansion that mother and daughter live in and is in disrepair? I know that Big Edie was divorced in 1931, and it sounded like "little Edie" had the advantages of an expensive education through college, which would have been right before WWII. What changed? There is no narration here, nor do the documentary makers ask questions. They just let the cameras roll and record whatever happens. Big Edie is in her late 70s yet retains a kind of beauty. However, she talks over little Edie whenever they are in the same room, making it difficult to understand either woman.What is clear visually is that they are both living in squalor. A cat defecates behind a very old portrait of Big Edie and both Edies laugh about being glad somebody gets to do what they want? Nobody tries to clean it up. Big Edie spends her time on a filthy mattress with stuff she might need stacked on top, yet seems to have no trouble with mobility. They make food for the cameramen including pate on crackers that looks like cat food on crackers. I would want a tetanus shot first.Little Edie has a mountain of regret. She talks about how she wanted to be a dancer, how somebody wanted to marry her but her mother drove him away, and how she has been taking care of her mother due to her health on and off since the second world war. She mentions how much she hates the country and misses the noise of the city. Little Edie is remarkably well preserved. When this film was made she was 56 but she could pass for forty. She color coordinates all of her wardrobes including her scarves and headdresses that hide her alopecia, yet she won't mop the floor. Shades of faded feelings of being aristocracy perhaps? Another question I had that went unanswered was where were big Edie's sons? Both lived into the 1990's, yet they are nowhere to be found. Maybe they had the sense to get out of Dodge.Why are these recluses the subject of a documentary in the first place? Because big and little Edie are Jackie Kennedy Onnasis' aunt and cousin, respectively, and because Suffolk County was trying to evict them based on the condition of the house and grounds - there was no running water at one point - until Jackie supplied the funds to get the estate up to snuff.Don't look for lots of answers here, because there are really none. It is just a fascinating portrait of two recluses who have slipped into their own form of normality although it looks horrifying to outsiders.

Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer, David Maysles and his brother Albert Maysles' documentary feature about American socialites Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (1895-1977) and Edith Bouvier Beale (1917-2002) was shot on location in the town of East Hampton in southeastern Suffolk, New York in USA and is an American production which was produced by American documentary filmmakers Albert Maysles and David Maysles (1932-1987). It tells the story about Edith aka Little Edie and her mother Edith aka Big Edie who whilst living on an estate called Grey Gardens in the mid 1970s where they had been living quite isolated for many years, were faced with eviction after being ordered to clean up the house by the Suffolk County Health Commission.This Direct Cinema documentary which examines the everyday life, relationship and personalities of a singer in her early 80s and a fashion model and cabaret performer in her mid-50s, draws an utterly intimate and condensed portrayal of a very contradictory relationship between a mother and daughter who ever since the daughter put her career on hold and left New York in the early 1950s, lived on their own in a descending house with eight cats and other wild animals. Besides the fact that Little Edie was the first cousin and Big Edie the aunt of former First Lady of the United States and book editor Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929-1994), it early on becomes evident why this somewhat eccentric pair was chosen as subjects for a documentary feature.In this close look into the private and personal lives of two human beings who was in a far from ideal situation, one becomes more concerned with the people who are unveiling their lives in the most candid way than the story itself, and begins to question if this is more than just a quest for attention and fame and weather or not they really wanted someone to see as much of themselves and their lifestyle as this revealing portrait shows. As the outgoing and outspoken Little Edie unlike her mother acts as if she is the center of this documentary, she becomes the main character and it is therefore also mostly narrated by and from her point of view. Due to a style of filmmaking where surprises are frequent and where anything can happen at any given moment, this real-life soap opera which was screened Out of competition at the 29th Cannes International Film Festival in 1976, becomes an at times melodramatic and very truthful depiction of two adult women who despite hardly ever, while on camera, being able to maintain a civilized conversation, is tightly connected and cares for as much as they resent one another. A lingering and astonishing true story that underlines the theory about the truth being stranger than fiction.

Grey Gardens (1975) *** (out of 4) Bizarre "documentary" about Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edie - cousin and niece of Jacqueline Onassis - living in a dump of a mansion where we get to see their day-to-day lives. I'm really not sure if bizarre really covers everything in this film and I'm really not sure that this should or could be called a documentary. The content has come under attack by many critics. I think most agree that it's a very entertaining movie but at the same time it makes you feel more like a voyeur looking in on a couple obviously sick people. I understand the directors getting attacked for filming these two as it seems clear that there's really no point to it other than to show what wacky behaviors they have and to see how someone with so much money and connections to greatness can be living like bums off the street. The film opens up with newspaper clips of the two about to be kicked out of their mansion because of how dirty it is and then we see that Onassis had to place cleaned so that the could stay. From here we see the mother and daughter talk about their lives, scream and shout and do other things including feed the raccoons that are living in their attack. We also see their countless cats that are constantly running around. It's rather funny watching this film today because of all the connections it has to reality TV and shows like Springer where people just show all their troubles, bad behaviors and other issues that really should be kept private. We see the two women go off on wild subjects ranging from who they should have married to whether or not they've made mistakes in their lives and a strange bit where the daughter talks about a local repairman wanting her sexually. There's really no "direction" to the film or story trying to be told. It really doesn't seem as if the directors are wanting us to get to know these people or understand them. It seems like the main goal is just to show these two rather eccentric people go off on rants, wild off-topic discussions and other bits of weirdness. It's not a masterpiece and one could question showing these two but there's no doubt that it's impossible to turn away.