Grey
Gardens (1976)
Directed
by: Albert
& David Maysles & Ellen Hovde & Muffie Meyer.
There will always be a question
in documentary filmmaking about whether filmmakers are exploiting their subject
or not – and it’s something that seems to come up every time Grey Gardens is
discussed. The film, one of the most famous of all documentaries, is about Big
Edie Beale and her daughter, Little Edie Beale, living in a dilapidated mansion
that looks like a wreck from the outside, and even worse on the inside. The
Beales came to the attention of the filmmakers – brothers Albert & David
Maysles, along with co-directors Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer – because they
were distant relatives of Jackie Onassis – but the filmmakers found them so
fascinating, they just kept coming back. The film was made just a few years
before Big Edie died, and it portrays the dysfunctional mother-daughter
relationship warts in all – the two of them bicker constantly, sometimes
passive-aggressively, and sometimes not so passively. They are, to put it
kindly, eccentric. They have the trappings of wealth – the large house in the
rich neighbor, accent that denote class and “breeding” – but the money isn’t
quite there anymore. Big Edie’s husband – Little Edie’s father – left them
years ago, and there isn’t a lot of talk about him. Little Edie never married,
although there is talk of a stream of gentlemen suitors that she hated – and
regrets of not heading to Europe when the war started like so many of her
friends – who ended up married – did.
Grey Gardens is about memory and
regret – and about how these two women are trapped in a seemingly endless cycle
of misery, argument, accusations, forgiveness and then back again. Little Edie
keeps threatening to go back to New York – she was happy in New York once, and
live the life she was meant to – the life she could have lived, if her mother
didn’t need her so much. Her mother pokes and prods her right back – telling
her she doesn’t need her as much as Little Edie thinks. To a certain degree,
both of them are constantly performing for each other – they both need each
other, and neither want to admit that they need each other, which shows just
how much they really do. Both of them are constantly performing – although you
get the impression that even if they Maysles and their cameras were not there,
the two Beale women would be doing to same thing. Both of the women are
theatrical by nature – and while they love having the camera on them, I don’t
think the absence of them would have caused the pair to stop performing.
I know the Maysles and company
have always claimed that the film is not exploitive, but if we’re being honest
it is – at least in part. Little Edie’s flamboyant monologues are often quite
funny, and we are certainly invited to laugh during the course of the movie,
but are we laughing at the Beales? They don’t seem to be laughing, so perhaps
we are. And yet, the film also gives the Beales precisely what they want – and
they seemed to no regrets about it. They are being given an audience – at first
of just the Maysles brothers themselves, and ultimately to millions of others.
And the brothers wisely let the Beales tell their own story completely –
whether or not that’s the truth. Whatever happened to lead the pair to live
this way, what happened to the house, why they’re alone, and why they’re only
living in a few rooms of a huge home – is a story that the Maysles could
probably have explored from another point of view – or at least given wider
context. They don’t though – and that’s for the best. The film is about memory
more than anything, and why let facts or context interfere with that?
No comments:
Post a Comment