Gray Gardens (1975)

(East Hampton New York, 1973)
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Documentary filmmakers the Maysles brothers where tuned on to the story of Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter "Little Edie", when making an ultamity scraped documentary on other members of the Bouvier clan. Aunt and cousin to the former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the Beales were living in there dilapidated East Hampton estate Gray Gardens in a conditions deemed by the community unsanitary. There was no electricity or running water, garbage had piled up inside, and the mansions grounds had become a variable jungle. The reclusive pair was however able to improve things enough so as not to be evicted, but the house was still a disturbing emblem of decay when a documentary film crew came to chronicle its residences lives in the mid-1970's.

How did this happen?, is the question that runs through Gray Gardens. How did these two lives just sort of collapse in on each other, and become so mired in this rut? It is a question never truly answered. They were wealthy, they had both been moderately attractive women when younger. "Big Edie" had made records, and had a prolonged affair with a musician and writer, while "Little Edie" had attended college and received marriage proposals from multiple millionaires. Yet somehow, starting apparently in the early 1950's, (the film is vague on details which only adds to its effectiveness) both their lives just kind of stopped. While her mother had been separated from her father for some time, (being loyal Catholics they never officially divorced, though he lived with another women) right around 1952 "Little Edie" (full name: Edith Bouvier Beale) became concerned about her welfare, to the point where she says she could barley sleep. Having been living in New York City for some years, apparently as an unsuccessful actress, her lifestyle subsidized by the family fortune, young Edith returned to the home of her youth for what was apparently to have been a short time. Twenty years later she was still there.
The two lived mostly alone, though they had one regular visitor in a young man named Jeremy, whose exact purpose for visiting is never made clear in the movie. There were other visitors too on rare occasion, an unidentified middle-aged women, and an elderly man are the only two who come to "Big Edie's" 79th birthday part, a simple affair for which she actually traveled outside her small room, an apparently rare occurrence. Most of the time its just them alone, and in this case a film crew which never numbers more then two. The Edith's reminisce, look through old photographs, feed their eight cats, and listen to self-help guru Dr. Norman Vincent Peale on the radio. Then they complain, and bitterly spare with one other, both bemoaning of the sacrifices they've made, both lamenting lost or never-lived lives. It's hypnotically drawing, yet also repellent, its what happens when people just stop, out of fear, out of laziness, out of something unexplainable. In short it is terrifying, yet absolutely human. It is incredible film making.