| Portrait Films | Release Date: September 27, 1975 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
13
Mixed:
3
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
The film’s final shot of Little Edie dancing alone on the filthy floorboards of her rotten hallway is as poignant an image as can be imagined. Simultaneously humorous, pathetic, and triumphant, it is the unconscious statement of a person railing against the world, lost in the maze of her own past and the uncertainty of her future, at once hopelessly deluded and consciously defiant.
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One of the most entertaining films ever made by the legendary Maysles brothers and their gifted associates. [17 Apr 1998, p.B2]
Grey Gardens, one of the most haunting documentaries in a long time, preserves their strange existence, and we're pleased that it does. It expands our notions of the possibilities. It's about two classic eccentrics, two people who refuse to live the way they're supposed to, but by the film's end we see that they live fully, in ways of their own choosing.
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Part of the reason Grey Gardens—named for the dilapidated East Hamptons mansion Little Edie shares with her mother, Edith “Big Edie” Bouvier Beale—is so deep and endlessly rewatchable is that the Beales’ pleasure in being seen is matched by the Maysles’ joy in watching. These exhibitionists found the perfect voyeurs, and vice versa.
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As one who first saw Grey Gardens two decades ago, I can happily confirm that its impact is lasting. [3 July 1998, p.L34]
Perhaps the movie's value, or lack of it, lies not in the input of the Beales, the Maysles, et al., but in the degree of seriousness audiences bring to the theater. Some viewers will be shocked, some will be touched, but, unfortunately, the spectators this sad story is most likely to attract, amuse, and vindicate are the sort whose obsession with the upper crust, especially its blue-blooded stratum, is fed by envy and spite--each an unhealthy attribute on its own, but poisonous in combination with the other.
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There is no doubt about the artistr and devotion that the Maysles have used in recording the life in Grey Gardens." There is no reason to doubt them when they say they love and admire the Beales. But the moviegoer will still feel like an exploiter. To watch Grey Gardens is to take part in a kind of carnival of attention with two willing but vulnerable people who had established themselves, for better or worse, in the habit of not being looked at. And what happens when the carnival moves on?
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