With each day the raccoons steadily make cracks in the lime green wall in search of white bread and cookies. Grey gardens. Two docu-filmmaking brothers - the Maysles - visit Big Edie and her daughter Little Edie at the site of a dilapidated 28-room mansion. Big Edie, aged 79, is Jacqueline Bouvier's aunt, and Little Edie, aged 56, is Jackie's cousin. They live at the Grey Gardens estate in East Egg, Long Island, in sight and proximity of the beach and the passing of luxury cruise liners on the Long Island Sound. Like Gatsby these daughters of fortune are parvenus to an aristocracy that wilts outside their sundrenched terrace.
Big Edie was a singer, still is. She sings her scales and reminisces; scolds her daughter when Little Edie tries out the bloodline for herself through the acoustic space of her pleasant-shaped throat. Little Edie puts on a scratched record, an old tune spontaneously dreamy, recognizable, and Big Edie mists up and sings along mechanically, a refrain, a bar, a pause to catch up with the swell of nostalgia that has taken 60+ years to come back to her. She acts unaware of the camera, they both do, mother and daughter, & Big Edie sinks into lavish yearnings she hides so well like old foolish hats & unopened love letters in a locked drawer. She puts on her whitelocked head a motley wide circle-brim hat, bends it half brim at the fore, and smiles when she eats butter pecan ice cream, her ailing suntanned body warm under the soiled zebra-striped blanket odorous with stray cat hair and dust crumbs. The camera cuts repeatedly to a framed unhung portrait of Big Edie when she was a young and pulchritudinous singer. She is lovely and regal, terrifically beautiful.
Little Edie is going bald, or she's already bald. Either way she never once doesn't wear a scarf or blanket to wrap her head in, & never once is the scarf the same one yesterday or the day before. She has an assortment of head scarves that match the assortment of colors that she tinkers with in her clothes. It's likely that every scene has Little Edie wearing a completely new combination of fabrics and linens for clothes. Sometimes a dress worn upside down, often tight fitting slightly revealing pseudo-swimsuits or true-type swimsuits, or baby tight skirts and strapless tops and blouses. She wears her clothes as she would have 30 years ago. She's in search of a libra man but she keeps falling for sagittarius, gets bored by the company of raccoons and cats, loves her mother to death, and enjoys the fact that men are finally in the house again. Little Edie was a dancer, and she never hesitates to dance a number for the Maysles (one suspects that she has a crush on Al.) She too shows us pictures of her youthful days so long ago, when she modeled for various things and took photos for famous people with famous people by famous people. (She even dated J. Paul Getty & had a fling with a Kennedy herself.) Like her mother she toured the hi-society circuit and made her rounds of the glam game; like her mother she too is terrifically beautiful: proudly showing photos of the youthful Edith Beale from her album, she smiles the same smile her mother had at the same age & dreams no doubt of what living as one pleases with no regard for marriage and the social manners of a housewife or for what men care for in a disciplined lady has led her to. Unlike her mom she would have liked a man, a good libra man, but her s-t-a-u-n-c-h love for her mother (more of an awe perchance of that matriarch's stubborn refusal to hitch herself to any man's headway) overcomes her, keeps her tied to the bed placed dutifully at her mother's chattering side, & to the slow decay of Grey Gardens and its sunset boulevard languish, its broken sing-song and stained deceitful mirrors.
Mother and daughter living together as children would, as bohemians are thought to live, in complete filth and wantonness and the indecision of the hours. But their glut is talk, and their cryptic talk holds no pretense to allusion or indemnity or pretension. The speak as they are: in a disordered cadence somehow sophisticate, playfully sincere. They live in Grey Gardens, years after the last spark of material lux had faded with their sense of convention, while the raccoons board and the cats yawn and the water faucets spit rust color, and they live there even now in the "orgastic future that year by year recedes before [them]..." as they are "borne back ceaselessly into the past."
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