Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2009 > April > 10 > Entry
Translating ‘Grey Gardens’ 4
For Parts 1, 2 & 3, see posts below …
It also benefits from views of the estate at various stages of glory and decline. This includes the mountains of filth that, before the documentary was made, had been cleaned out by municipal authorities, and structural failings, which Jacqueline Onassis and Lee Radizwill paid to stabilize. In the movie, we see the sprawling foulness only through newspaper clippings.
The 2009 drama shows the jazzy Manhattan that Little Edie briefly conquers. We are introduced the married man (Daniel Baldwin, looking deceptively like his brother, Alec), who becomes another of her romantic disappointments. Ken Howard earned the thankless role of stuffy Phelan Beale, a one-note character that appears almost sexist in reverse.
As in the documentary, all eyes zero on the two women. Jessica Lange has played fragile, misunderstood eccentrics before, and has won major awards for those performance, but Drew Barrymore stretched her acting muscles to play Little Edie. The only thing missing from her complex portrayal was the real woman’s overtly sexual come-ons during the documentary’s making, especially toward “The Marble Faun,” a comely gardener, absent in the HBO drama.
Did we need this movie? Perhaps not. Maybe the ineradicable images from the 1975 documentary would have sufficed for all time.
Yet director and co-writer Michael Sucsy and his team have made a convincing case that the Beales’ story is the stuff of enduring drama, worth retelling in more than one medium.
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