Grey Gardens shows voyeurism at its best - On the Way to the Bus

Until recently, the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens was an elite member of Video Americain's rack of 15 or so out-of-print films (End of the Road, Mondo Trasho, Breakin') that required a whopping $150 deposit just to rent out for a rainy weekend.

Now that Grey Gardens is available on DVD at the St. Paul St. movie oasis, some of the adventure of seeking out the rare cult film and getting wrapped up in its fascinating world may have died down a bit. But watching the film itself continues to be an entertaining, sometimes harrowing adventure that makes the depthless voyeurism of Real World look like, well, depthless voyeurism.

Everyone and their mom has voyeuristic tendencies, whether they search for minute information on a crush on Google or watch Ozzy Osbourne's family going about its business on television. Seldom is voyeurism as grand in scope and as rich in meaning as it is in Grey Gardens. Not surprisingly, the film was accused at the time of exploiting the unconventional lives of its subjects in order to make an entertaining flick. But it is apparent from watching the film that directors David and Albert Maysles love their subjects, and their subjects love them back. Only with that rapport are they able to document such a substantive on-screen relationship and successfully convey its attractions as well as its contradictions.

On July 29, 1952, a young woman named Edie Bouvier Beale (cousin to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy) returned from six years spent in New York City to live in her mother's East Hampton mansion. As the daughter said in a 1976 Interview magazine discussion with Kathryn Graham that is included on the DVD, "I never got away again." It ended up a permanent move that led her to embark on an idle and reclusive life with her mother. In 1971, the two women made the press when the Grey Gardens mansion was raided by about 15 men who told them to clean up their decaying, cat- and raccoon-filled estate or be forced to move out. In an interview, the elder Edie (they are referred to in the movie as Big Edie and Little Edie) called the raid "the most disgusting, atrocious thing to happen in America." The similarly bizarre younger Edie once claimed "I think our raid is like Watergate."

A few years later, the Maysles brothers spent about six weeks, combined with occasional revisits, documenting the daily life of the now 56-year-old woman and her nearly 80-year-old mother. The on-screen lives of the women prove bizarre enough to intrigue but close-to-home enough to resonate with anyone who was ever concerned about the passing of time and the meaning and direction of his or her life.

Though her father wished her to become a "woman lawyer," Little Edie studied English literature at school; her casual knowledge of the subject comes across when she misquotes Robert Frost and refers to the young maintenance-boy Jerry as Marble Faun. The reference is to Nathaniel Hawthorne's book ("If you haven't read that, you haven't lived"), but her remembrances of the contents of the mysterious novel are hazy. Her spontaneous monologues are often a succession of unforgettable quotes: "Mother wanted me to come out in a kimono but we had quite a fight," "The human mind will not function when it's hot" and, in a comment recently used by singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright , "it's awfully difficult to keep the line between the past and the present."

As a woman whose only interests were "the Catholic Church, swimming and dancing," Edie is fond of her mother yet still marked by an eternal, tragic regret for having "never really lived." As she reveals in the Graham interview, "I could never do anything else then what I did, but the regret is terrible." She continually talks about not being able to spend another dreaded winter at Grey Gardens, but the viewer increasingly comes to see that these are empty threats. Everything in the house is permanently unfinished. The rooms are never fully decorated, and Little Edie never brings down the green goblets for Big Edie's birthday. Instead, she pours their wine into plastic cups.

Grey Gardens continually pours out such beautiful scenes that put the film on par with the grandest fictions of American literature, and put Little and Big Edie as some of the most fascinating and complex heroines to ever make it on film.

Precious few films nowadays inspire me to watch all the DVD baggage that come along with them, but the interviews on Grey Gardens found me lapping up all the additional info I could get about this movie. The DVD's most recent interview with Little Edie is a Christmastime 2000 phone call with David Maylses. Little Edie, now about the same age as Big Edie in the film, discusses her sadness over the voting process that caused Al Gore's defeat in the presidential elections ? an interesting piece of consistency, since in the 1976 interview she claimed, "What I loved about America was the voting system." Despite her often naive and paranoid political prescriptions, I found myself desperately wanting to know what she would think about New York after Sept. 11.

Viewers continue to love to watch Grey Gardens, sometimes obsessively watching it over and over. More interesting is Edie Beale's relationship to the movie that made a few days of her life in the mid-'70s become a public document.

"I think it's a shame I never married you," said Edie to David Maysles in their 2000 interview. "I guess I've been in love with you for 30 years.