Grey Gardens 2009

Grey Gardens unfolds as a humane, patient study of two women steady in their quirks and stubbornness, Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith Bouvier Beale—known as Big Edie [Jessica Lange] and Little Edie [Drew Barrymore]—who were once tied to New York City’s high society and are now living quietly at their Long Island home, Grey Gardens. The film treats their life with a calm, observational tone, letting small moments reveal the complexity of loyalty, memory, and independence.

The narrative moves with a series of reflective flashbacks that chart how the family came to inhabit the estate. Phelan Beale, Big Edie’s husband and the father of Little Edie, ultimately divorces, and the film captures the shifts this creates in the sisters’ world. Little Edie pursues ambitions in acting and a romance with a famous, married man, Julius “Cap” Krug [Daniel Baldwin], while her father cautions that she must find a husband to support the lifestyle they’ve maintained. The mood is both intimate and gently disquieting as Little Edie imagines a different life, even as the practicalities of money and status press in from outside.

As years pass, the two women—proud and protective of their autonomy—face the hard reality that the house is financially and physically in decline. After Phelan’s death, their sons urge Big Edie to downsize or move to Florida, but she stubbornly insists that the house is in her name and that she will leave only with death. What follows is a slow, inexorable retreat into isolation: Grey Gardens becomes a sanctuary and a trap, a place of stray cats, raccoons, and heaps of belongings that deepen the sense of decay while sharpening the characters’ idiosyncrasies.

Into this already fragile world, Jackie Kennedy’s sister Lee Radziwill steps in to fund a cleanup and restoration, and the film introduces documentarians who will forever change the Beales’ story. The independent filmmakers Albert and David Maysles [Arye Gross] and [Louis Ferreira] introduce themselves, capturing the family in a way that feels almost uncomfortably intimate. When Radziwill’s involvement wanes, the Maysles press on, choosing Big Edie and Little Edie as the most compelling threads in their footage and deciding to make a film about them. The result is a meta-narrative as Grey Gardens is born from the process of filmmaking itself, not just the lives it documents.

The documentary-style sequences reveal the contrasts between the two women: Big Edie’s pride and defiance, and Little Edie’s yearning for a different destiny. As the film inside the film progresses, the tension between power, control, and affection comes to the fore. The moments of hostility between mother and daughter give way to tenderness, and the sisters’ bond ultimately surfaces as their most enduring connection. The film ends with a poignant reconciliation—the moment when Big Edie grants her blessing for Little Edie to attend the premiere of the documentary, even passing along sentimental mementos, including her wedding earrings and necklace, as a symbolic gesture of faith in a future the two may still share.

When Little Edie steps onto the Reno Sweeney stage in Greenwich Village to sing “Tea for Two,” the scene becomes a bittersweet affirmation of aspiration and memory. Backstage, the famous line springs to life in Big Edie’s voice as she answers a Times journalist with a mix of pride and humor: > No, Mr. Goodman, it’s all in the movie. The moment crystallizes the film’s core: the Beales’ lives are inseparable from the story the film tells, and the truth of their world remains both cherished and elusive.

The documentary closes with a final glimpse of resilience and defiance, punctuated by Little Edie’s soaring performance and the lingering sense that the Beales’ choices—whether seen as eccentric or admirable—have carved a lasting mark on the culture around them. The closing sentiment lingers as a quiet reminder of the line between providing a life and living one’s truth, a theme embodied in the closing image of Little Edie and her mother and summarized in her mother’s parting wisdom about the life they built together: a life that was, in its own way, priceless. > My mother gave me a truly priceless life.