Dan's Papers - May 1, 2009 - GREY GARDENS: THE FILM REVIEW

The wonderful thing about the original documentary about Grey Gardens, which has won many awards over the years, is the viewer's sudden discovery that two older high society ladies, one the mother of the other, are living together in a time warp in a great falling down mansion near the ocean in East Hampton in utter filth and squalor, and they think that everything is perfectly fine.

The trouble with the film Grey Gardens is that it steers away from this "present day" situation and tries to encompass the entire, complicated period of these people's lives between 1938 and 1978 in a low budget hour and a half HBO movie. It is too big a bite to take and accomplishes little, in spite of excellent performances by the two leads, particularly Drew Barrymore. It also doesn't help that, for budgetary reasons, it was entirely filmed in Canada. In order to hide that fact, the director is forced too often into close ups at the wrong time that result in never really capturing the sense of the place, which is something very important in a movie about a house. What he does capture is the fact that each actor is required to play their characters at ages 15 and 50 (Drew Barrymore) and at ages 45 and 80 (Jessica Lange) and that between close-ups and make-up, they can't do it successfully. It just doesn't look real.

I think the screenwriters were misled by the sensational 2005 Broadway play of the same name and the same story which, unlike the original documentary, has the first act take place in the house in 1938 when it was all elegant and spiffed up and the second act in the house in 1978 when the documentary was filmed. Christine Ebersol won all sorts of awards for her performance in this Broadway show. She plays the mother in the first act and in the second act the daughter now the same age as the mother was in the first act. It's a brilliant concept.

But here you have an all-over-the-place movie about 23 cats living in squalor, a philandering husband who, in 1938, is out of money, the Second World War looming, Jackie Kennedy (played by Jeanne Tripplehorn) showing up at Grey Gardens in a scene that is written not much better than soap opera, the young filmmakers making the documentary, some befuddled attempts by local health officials in 1978, raccoons eating garbage, Big Edie singing Cole Porter around the piano with her boyfriend in 1938 and I don't know what else, flashbacked and flash forwarded all over the place. The directing, by the way, is mediocre. And it is made worse by the problem of Canada.

I came out of the film thinking well, they get A for effort for trying to be true to the original, but then they should just have shown the original. I also give A for effort to the two actors who had to try to show emotion in the elaborate body suits and make up.

I'd also say that if you never saw the Broadway show or the documentary, then the film makes sense and is worth seeing. What really happened here back then is worth seeing, and this does tell the whole story, though free of passion. Otherwise, pass it up.