Here’s a movie I don’t understand at all: the dramatic
re-working of Grey Gardens, the Maysles Brother’s amazing documentary portrait
of the two Edith Beales, who lived in a decrepit mansion in East Hampton, NY.
First-time feature guy Michael Sucsy is behind the ‘remake’,
which has already cast Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as Big and Little Edie.
Now Jeanne Triplehorn has joined on as Jackie O; that Onassis was Big Edie’s
neice was the womens’ original claim to fame.
Also in the cast is Daniel Baldwin, Ken Howard, Malcolm
Gets and Arye Gross. Since Gross is playing Albert Maysles and Ken Howard is
Big Edie’s husband, this film will evidently go beyond the scope of the
original doc, which concentrated principally on the dreams and failures of the
Beales.
Sucsy, Lange and Barrymore will have to work overtime to recreate the
outsider fashion sense of the pair, with particular emphasis on Little Edie’s
designs, as those were the real reasons for fame, beyond having Jackie O in the
family tree. That’s where I get lost with this project; the Beales were crazy, but they were also genuine, and it will be so easy for a dramatic recreation to go off the rails trying to emphasize ‘wacky’ without nailing how real these people were.