Grey Gardens

No...people don't really like this do they? Maybe I missed something (or everything) but I could not wait for this to be over. Yes...it's a bit sad that "little" Edie is in the state that she's in and the co-dependency angle is certainly present but these two points were made clear in the first 15 minutes. That would have been fine if it was a short, but there was still another hour and a half of off-tune singing and shaggy dog stories that the viewer couldn't possibly understand.

Documentarists are on to something when they decide to turn their lenses toward eccentric, bitter old ladies. We can mock the Beales' foibles all we want, but it's hard to escape the lessons that watching them teaches us about ourselves. Exemplary.

Adrift on a raccoon-ridden raft in a sea of green, Little Edie Beale performs for her first audience in ages a tragedy of dreams deferred and unfulfilled. The result is a film of contrasts: of aristocratic posturing and decrepit living conditions, of threats of abandonment and fears of the same, of youthful promise (or at least some imagination thereof) and present reality. "It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. You know what I mean? It's awfully difficult."

Intriguing...and weird. And ultimately kinda creepy--like a bad Thanksgiving dinner that never ends (you can practically smell the cat piss).

I watched this expecting some amusing and/or acrid anecdotes concerning the luminous people these women must have encountered over the years. No such luck. Like watching a perpetual train wreck.