| Review:
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While there's no doubt that life is always tougher
for the have-nots, there's something unique to the historically
thwarted lives of all women that tends to cross class lines.
And the film Grey Gardens, based in part on the 1975 Maysles
Brothers cult documentary of the same name, connects with
both extraordinary candor and empathy, to the simultaneously
mother/daughter pampered and deformed idle rich personalities
of those eccentric Jackie Kennedy kin.***
The directing debut of Michael Sucsy and co-written
with the supremely gifted Patricia Rozema (Kit Kittredge,
I Hear The Mermaids Singing), Grey Gardens seamlessly glides
back and forth through time beginning with the Great Depression
era, as it charts the rise and fall of these Hamptons, Long
Island high society women wierdly oblivious to the Crash
of '29, and why. Drew Barrymore, in perhaps the most stellar
performance of her career, believably spans the many decades
as 'Little Edie' Bouvier Beale, the unhappy sheltered daughter
of Edith Beale (Jessica Lange) and an absentee patrician
lawyer (Ken Howard).***
In accordance with pre-feminist bourgeois conventions,
both mother and daughter were primed to lead passive lives
in maximum security gilded cages, despite their musical
and performing talents and painful yearnings to creatively
blossom. Unhappy Little Edie, named after her own mother
and essentially relegated to living in mom's own dejected
shadow, opts for her fifteen minutes of youthful rebellion,
by escaping to New York City to pursue fame. But after a
heartbreaking affair with a married man (Daniel Baldwin),
Little Edie is rounded up by Dad and sent back home, where
she spends the rest of her days in mutual deepening madness
with Mom, and emotional and financial abandonment by the
family patriarch for another woman. And with mother and
daughter psychologically doomed in their failure to find
men 'who will give you a long leash.'***
And while these two exceptional women were pressured
by their social miliue to abandon any dreams of self-actualization
and independence, when they're ironically left to their
own devices after being forced into lives of pampered perpetual
children, they naturally haven't a clue. Eventually after
complaints from neighbors and visits by health department
officials to their now foul smelling and dilapidated sprawling
Grey Gardens mansion, filled with animal excrement and mountains
of garbage, no heat or hot water and cats cohabitating with
raccoons, an embarrassed Jackie Kennedy Onassis (Jeanne
Tripplehorn) is somewhat shamed by the media into stopping
by and saving them from squalor.***
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