Grey Gardens (HBO) |  | Director: Michael Sucsy
Actors: Jessica Lange, Drew Barrymore, Malcolm Gets, Daniel Baldwin, Ken Howard
Studio: HBO
Category: DVD
List Price: $26.98
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Rating:  72 reviews
Sales Rank: 2055
Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, Widescreen, Subtitled, Closed-captioned, NTSC
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled)
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 104 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.6
MPN: 1000097229
UPC: 883929071890
EAN: 0883929071890
ASIN: B001WAKFP2
Theatrical Release Date: 2009
Release Date: July 14, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | GREY GARDENS (DVD MOVIE) |
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Product Description
Studio: Hbo Home Video Release Date: 07/14/2009 Run time: 103 minutes
Amazon.com
It's hard to imagine a feature film that could improve upon the classic 1975 Hamptons-gothic documentary Grey Gardens, co-directed by Albert and David Maysles. Yet this Grey Gardens, directed by Michael Sucsy for HBO Films, captures not only the pathos and peculiarity of Edith Beale, mère et fille--aristocrats who were aunt and cousin to former first lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy--but it provides something deeper and richer: the background story of the glamorous Beale ladies, and a glimpse at how they slid from gay 1930s high society to sharing rotting living quarters with litters of cats and raccoons.Drew Barrymore, the Grey Gardens standout, rises to the particular challenge of playing "Little Edie" Beale, whose accent, carriage, and mannerisms have developed their own camp following over the years. Barrymore's performance is a revelation: she captures the weirdness of Edie, but she knows what the documentary fans know--the reality of what Edie once had been, and what she was becoming. Barrymore's performance is delicate and strong, with a hint of sadness underneath the fading ingénue's brave face. Jessica Lange plays "Big Edie," the mother who made more concrete choices to wall herself off from the outside world. Lange is excellent, though Big Edie is a less nuanced character than her daughter, and she seems more content with her lot, perched in her teeming twin bed surrounded by mounds of cats and trash. The filmmakers pay deep homage to the documentary, and carefully recreate the third lead character of the drama--the East Hampton, N.Y., mansion Grey Gardens itself. The making-of featurette is a must-have for fans of either film, as the filmmakers and actors talk about how they built a three-story facsimile of the home near Toronto (which also stands in for the Manhattan scenes). Also fascinating is the story of how certain beloved sets from the documentary were painstakingly re-created, including the Beales’ yellow bedroom, the entryway that played stage to the dancing aspirations of Little Edie, and the crumbling porch and yard where Edie would pose and prance, decked out in tights, shorts, a pinned-up skirt, and her signature sweater-snood, fastened with a brooch just so. "Well, Mother and I are very entertaining, that's true," says Little Edie, when the Maysles first approach her about cooperating in their documentary. And, happily, viewers of HBO's Grey Gardens could not agree more. --A.T. Hurley
Stills from Grey Gardens (click for larger image)
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 72
 Bittersweet March 15, 2010
Linda (CT, United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Kudos to Jessica Lang and Drew Barrymore for transcending the Hollywood ideal and daring to appear less than gorgeous. As this movie started, Jessica was right on target as marginal socialite Edith Bouvier Beale, but Drew was a bit young for the role as debutante "Little Edie". Never fear. Their resemblance to each other is uncanny. And the story vacillates between the 1930's and the 1970's, with these two actresses demonstrating the chutzpah to portray old.
Since I was awake and aware during the '70's, I'm sorry to report that I had never heard of these people, in spite of the documentary of their lives produced by Maysles brothers at the time. Duh. No matter, now I know. Edie the younger had been groomed to make a proper, prosperous marriage, according to her business magnate father. Her mother, however, was a show biz wanna-be, who taught her daughter to be a freer sort of spirit, but somehow young Edie's dreams also failed to materialize.
Long story short, mother and daughter end up genteel paupers, raising generations of cats amid the decaying Hamptons "summer cottage" owned by the mother. Jeanne Tripplehorn was spot on as newlywed Jackie Kennedy Onassis, who intervened to rehabilitate her aunt's home when the story hit the tabloids.
Gray Gardens is a quiet, bittersweet story about mothers and daughters and their intermingled hopes and dreams. HBO produced this movie, and they deserve recognition for their attempts to provide quality programming on television. Watch it for its stellar performances by some true professionals.
 A MISREPRESENTED HORROR MOVIE February 25, 2010
mark twain (Monrovia, Liberia)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Last night, pumped up after WHIP IT, I watched the first half of Grey Gardens - the Drew Barrymore, Jessica Lange version. From what I gather, the two are identical in regard to the basic hopelessness and extreme depressingness of the dysfunctional and thwarting relationship. It's not "cool" to be into this kind of thing. It's actually callous and self-serving. The reality is, dysfunctional relationships are not fun. The existence of the Beales was a long slow-moving misery. If I want to see a crazy domineering elderly woman and her equally dysfunctional daughter bicker for hours on end, I'll visit my mother and sister. My sister is, as a grown "woman" who is forty going on nine, living at home with my ageing and quite abusively senile mother. They bicker incessantly, are both completely irrational and deeply unattractive. Probably this sort of relationship and these sorts of psychologies are only interesting to people who have not lived around such things, grown up in truly sick families... Trust me, it's NOT FUN, nor funny, nor "free-spirited." The Beales were not free spirits, they were chained spirits subsisting in the world of their broken psychologies for which there was no fixing. My family is the same: broken and unfixable, deeply unattractive people. Every time I've tried to intervene to instil some normalcy, or at least alleviate the filth of their living conditions, they've subjected me to irrational and spiteful abuse. After trying to have my parents conserved (a legal process), I've given up on saving them from themselves. So movies like this just make me sad.
Update: Okay, for the sake of you people, I heroically burdened myself with the rest of this thing. I was eating dinner while watching the movie, which I shoulda known was a big mistake. One scene, featuring big and little Edie eating nameless black muck from a cardboard carton made me almost vomit. The very idea that this sort of abject decrepitude can be anything like the tagline "True glamor never fades" enrages me. Listen up people: this is a misrepresented HORROR MOVIE. It is the true story of a disgustingly narcissistic woman and her completely un-nurturing relationship with her emotionally crippled daughter. Any parent who would rather emotionally chain their child than see that child thrive as an individual is a sick piece of garbage and that is what big Edie was. No glamor, no irreverent bon-vivant eccentricities, just a crazy cat lady and her emotionally chained daughter who descended by many gradual steps into an abyss of decrepitude. On the plus side, the movie makes you want to do a million push ups, then clean the house for the rest of your life. It makes you realize how worthwhile cleanliness and vigor are. Saddest of all for me, the women in this movie are physically repulsive, devoid of sex appeal. This may seem a shallow observation, but it isn't.
Addendum 2.28.10: OPEN LETTER TO DREW BARRYMORE:
Drew Barrymore, one can only hope that you, like all artists, pore over the reviews of your work. And so I send this message in a bottle, yeah.
Drew, what were you thinking? You are clearly very talented. Whip It is an inspired creation, one of the most dynamic and uplifting movies ever made. So now I gotta ask you: was Grey Gardens intended as an anti-Whip It? Because that does seem to be the jist. Having now seen the first part of the original documentary, it's clear to me that the HBO Grey Gardens offers a grimmer interpretation of the dynamics between little and big Edie than is present in the Maysle's film. The plight of little Edie is more plaintive in the HBO version. By the way, I think you captured little Edie very, very well. But why? Was the intent to produce a horror film and was it then mis-marketed by the suits at HBO as some slyly endearing snort of uplift? I could see this happening. The little Edie in the HBO production is a tragic figure, the general tone of the film bleak to the point of revulsion. The contrast between Edie's youthful promise and her gradual dejected acceptance of her fate is crushing. The scene where she returns home to find the house becoming disheveled, her face registering that she is deeply disturbed and revolted by what is happening... this makes her subsequent acceptance of her lot all the more harrowing and horrific. It's all very well for her to say, "I could have left at any time..." In life and in relationships it's rarely so simple. The chains that bind our hearts to those we love and who nevertheless hurt us seem to bind us more closely the more these parents let us down. Little Edie, in your portrayal, yearns to somehow make it okay for her mother, to fix her mother somehow, as if this is her responsibility. Goddammit it's all so twisted and yet so understandable.
But, Drew, I gots to know. Was it your intention to make an anti-Whip It, where the protagonist succumbs utterly to her mother's manipulations? Please, tell me. Give me some sign. Defecate into an envelope and send it to the North Pole. I NEED to know.
ADDENDUM 3.6.10 THE DREAM POLICE THEY'RE COMING OUT OF MY HEAD.
This morning I had a Drew Barrymore dream in which I was watching an episode of Fox Force Five, wherein a group of Five foxy chicks were sent out on crime fighting missions by their Charlie-esque boss and mentor, Johnny Fox - played by Samuel L. Jackson. I seem to remember that Samuel L. Jackson's character was an invalid in a plastic bubble or something. He had some kind of infirmity, which however did not inhibit him from wearing a lot of Kangol and coming on suave and debonair, in a menthol cigarette billboard Ladera Heights kind of way. You Culver City residents, you know what I'm talking about. But at any rate, each of the Foxes had her own special ability. Drew Barrymore's character had the ability to start fires with her mind. As I watched, the bad guy, he suddenly caught on fire and he was staggering around on fire, waving his arms in slow motion while he was on fire and while Drew Barrymore's character was staring at him fixedly with bulging eyes. It was pretty engrossing. I woke up refreshed, and with a TV treatment in my head. I owe it all to Mirtazapine. That dream movie was so good in fact, I'm gonna go ahead and bump Grey Gardens up one more star.
 Beautiful Film, Sad Story February 15, 2010
Campos Marroquin De Ma (Guatemala City)
This film is absolutely beautiful. The execution is almost perfect, the music, the photograph, it is very faithful to the 1975 documentary. Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore delivered a brilliant performance. It's about the love story of two women, a mother and her daughter. They loved each other very much, but their relationship was kind of disfunctional. They decide to shut up the outside world. "Big Edie" the mother lived in denial and gave everything for granted. She educated her daughter the same way she was educated, "Get marry and then you can do whatever you want. If you don't, how are you going to take care of yourself?" She was afraid about being alone, then she manipulates the circumstances and her daughter to avoid staying alone.
Little Edie, resented the way her mother treated her. She says "You stuck me in this goddamm house" but the mother told her: "If you are stuck, it's only with yourself". She wanted so desperately to break free off the cage that had put herself in, but she didn't had the courage to be free. It's a very emotional and intense film. Unfortunately stories like this are not isolated, they are very common.
Born Rich February 7, 2010
S. J. Mckinney (Eau Claire, WI)
A very well done documentary bringing a perspective about the rich that helped me understand better the money vs happiness scenario we all hold. I used it in a class on Spiritual Economics.
So grey it was bleak February 3, 2010
Barbara B. (Oregon, USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Great acting and interesting sets, but so terribly sad and depressing. The device of starting at the end and progressing the action through flashbacks helped add interest, but not enough to keep me watching for long.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 72
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