“Grey Gardens” Blooms Anew

In an ideal world, everyone will come to HBO’s new feature film Grey Gardens, starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange, having already seen the landmark 1975 documentary of the same name. But even if this is your first exposure to Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter “Little” Edie, you’ll come away besotted with the tragicomic tale of these two roses of American aristocracy who withered on the vine. (And then you’ll run out and immediately rent the doc.)

The film begins in 1975, with Edith (Lange) and Edie (Barrymore) sitting in their moldering East Hamptons manse Grey Gardens, watching an early cut of the documentary by Albert (Arye Gross) and David Maysles (Justin Louis) that would make them legends. Cut to 1936, when 18-year-old Edie is having cold feet on the night on her debutante ball at the Pierre Hotel in New York City.

Edie wants to be a singer and an actress, and Edith tells her she can have everything in life, so long as she marries a rich man who will both take care of her and allow her the freedom to pursue a career. But Edie saw how her father Phelan Beale (Ken Howard) quashed Edith’s dreams of a singing career, so she remains suspicious of the traditional marriage track that young girls of her station were expected to follow.

Barrymore as the young Little Edie and the old Little Edie

Edith eventually stays at the family’s summer home, Grey Gardens, in the company of her music teacher Gould (gay actor Malcolm Gets), while Phelan lives a separate life in the city. Edie is thrilled to leave the Hamptons for Manhattan, where she hopes to make a big splash on Broadway.

But after Gould leaves Edith all alone in the big house — and Edith discovers that Edie is having an affair with a married man (Daniel Baldwin) — the Beales force Edie to go back to Grey Gardens.

And there Edie stayed for decades, cursing her missed opportunities and blaming her mother for interfering in her life. But both the original Grey Gardens and this dramatic retelling strongly suggest that Edie’s prison was of her own making, and that had she really wanted to strike out on her own and to get away from Edith, she certainly could have.

What made the Beales notorious was the fact that they continued to live in the house even after Phelan’s posthumous (and meager) trust fund dried up. By the time authorities came to check out the house in the early 1970s, it was falling apart, filled with raccoons and stray cats and deemed generally uninhabitable.

The actual Beales living in squalor

Things were so bad Edie had taken to improvising outfits out of curtains and scarves, which made her, following the release of the Maysles brothers’ film, a style icon.

The Beales would have had to abandon Grey Gardens were it not for the intervention of Edie’s cousin Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (Jeanne Tripplehorn, whose performance turns an icon into a flesh-and-blood human being), who financed the restoration of the house; the documentary was filmed soon thereafter, and we see Edith and Edie returning to old habits, letting raccoons burrow into the walls while the floors were littered with empty cat food cans.

What makes the story of the Beales so endlessly fascinating? (The documentary has spawned not only this new movie, but also a recent Broadway musical.) For one thing, their connection to the Bouvier/Kennedy clans make Edith and Edie Yankee countesses of a sort; add to that their real-life Miss Havisham status, as well as the love and hate mixed up in their complex mother-daughter relationship, and you’ve got the makings of great drama.

And that’s exactly what first-time director Michael Sucsy has pulled off here. Lesbian filmmaker Patricia Rozema — whose work spans I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing to Kit Kittredge: An American Girl — co-wrote the script with Sucsy, and Albert Maysles is credited as an advisor to the production.