Synopsis
Edie Bouvier Beale and her mother, Edith, two aging, eccentric relatives of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, are the sole inhabitants of a Long Island estate. The women reveal themselves to be misfits with outsized, engaging personalities. Much of the conversation is centered on their pasts, as mother and daughter now rarely leave home.
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Cast
- Edith Bouvier BealeSelf
- Edith Ewing Bouvier BealeSelf
- Brooks HyersSelf
- Norman Vincent PealeSelf
- Jack HelmuthSelf (uncredited)
- Albert MayslesSelf (uncredited)
- David MayslesSelf (uncredited)
- Jerry TorreSelf (uncredited)
- Lois WrightSelf (uncredited)
Recommendations
- 100
Chicago Sun-Times
Grey Gardens, one of the most haunting documentaries in a long time, preserves their strange existence, and we're pleased that it does. It expands our notions of the possibilities. It's about two classic eccentrics, two people who refuse to live the way they're supposed to, but by the film's end we see that they live fully, in ways of their own choosing. - 100
The Dissolve
Part of the reason Grey Gardens—named for the dilapidated East Hamptons mansion Little Edie shares with her mother, Edith “Big Edie” Bouvier Beale—is so deep and endlessly rewatchable is that the Beales’ pleasure in being seen is matched by the Maysles’ joy in watching. These exhibitionists found the perfect voyeurs, and vice versa. - 100
Philadelphia Inquirer
Classic. - 100
CineVue
The film’s final shot of Little Edie dancing alone on the filthy floorboards of her rotten hallway is as poignant an image as can be imagined. Simultaneously humorous, pathetic, and triumphant, it is the unconscious statement of a person railing against the world, lost in the maze of her own past and the uncertainty of her future, at once hopelessly deluded and consciously defiant. - 88
Slant Magazine
Grey Gardens remains one of the greatest and possibly only disaster movies that clearly benefits from not having seen the moments of reaping. - 83
Entertainment Weekly
It’s almost impossible to look away. - 80
The New Yorker
Rarely have high spirits and theatrical energy seemed like such a tragic waste; an era and its myths seem to be dying on-screen in real time. - 70
The New York Times
There is no doubt about the artistr and devotion that the Maysles have used in recording the life in Grey Gardens." There is no reason to doubt them when they say they love and admire the Beales. But the moviegoer will still feel like an exploiter. To watch Grey Gardens is to take part in a kind of carnival of attention with two willing but vulnerable people who had established themselves, for better or worse, in the habit of not being looked at. And what happens when the carnival moves on?
