Review: ‘Grey Gardens’
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By all laws of art and nature, “Grey Gardens’ should be dead by now, a dried-up husk leeched of all creative possibility.
The story of Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edie, a pair of former society fixtures found living in nonpicturesque yet strangely joyful squalor in the 1970s, began as a cover story in New York magazine. It went on to become a cult-worshiped documentary, a Broadway musical, a documentary of the making of that Broadway musical and now a movie on HBO. Surely someone should just write the ‘Grey Gardens’ symphony and be done with it.
Well, two someones, namely screenwriters Michael Sucsy (who also directed) and Patricia Rozema, have. Anchored by amazing performances by Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore, the “Grey Gardens” that premieres tonight is, like its subjects, a brilliant, moving, hilarious and mesmerizing mess of a movie that miraculously captures what made the Beales such iconic characters.
That’s a lot of adjectives, but ‘Grey Gardens’ is a lot of movie.
Lange, we are reminded once again, is an actress who can do anything, anything, including play a bedraggled, gray-haired woman who stands amid piles of rotting garbage and cat feces, looks Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (a terrific Jeanne Tripplehorn) straight in the eye and says in her most beguiling tones: ‘You know, chicken, if you ever need a place to stay, you’re always welcome here.’
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Photo credit: HBO