Grey Gardens (1975)

I guess I don't get it. I suffered through this movie, with hardly a moment of respite, constantly trying to see what it is that people like or respect about it, and I didn't come up with anything at all. Reading reviews online afterwards, words like "eccentric" and "unique" keep popping up. I suppose there is my first problem. I've known people like this in real life; I've been in their homes, and there's no charm to that existence. Roger Ebert, in his review, describes the film's two subjects as living "amicably" with raccoons. One can't live amicably with feral raccoons—they carry disease, and their feces are toxic. The same is true for the cat urine that apparently soaks this decaying mansion's floors and carpets (not to put too fine a point on it). Grey Gardens is simply a portrait of two intensely codependent ex-social butterflies, living out the ends of their lives in squalor. I don't know what I was supposed to feel about this, but it can't have been the level of repulsion that I did actually feel.

My second problem was at the personal level. Edith and Edie each have their charms, I suppose—Edie more so than her mother, in my opinion—but neither is nearly enough to carry a feature-length film. And the relationship between the two is just deeply dysfunctional. Not really that unusual or interesting, just thoroughly broken. The film seems to want to dwell in the irony of them pushing away from each other while at the same time clingingly desperately to their shared existence. OK, I guess, but isn't that a pretty run-of-the-mill mother-daughter struggle, even if it's taken to a bit of an extreme?

In the end I found nothing to care about in this movie. I did honestly try, for almost the entire length of it, but there was nothing there for me.