Review of HBO's Grey Gardens movie — Page 2

She's a friggin' BARRY-more.

"Unforgettable" is imprinted in her DNA.
John Barrymore as Richard III (in Henry Vi, Part One, actually)

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It was much better than I'd been expecting it to be. I think it was Jessica Lange's show all the way, she seemed to have a much better handle on Big Edie than Barrymore had on Little Edie.

On the whole, I think this HBO film is a far more successful dramatization of the documentary than the musical. Both women got fuller attention, and you just can't beat Jessica Lange's embodiment of Big Edie at all the stages of her life. Drew did her best, but just couldn't keep up, and the prosthetic makeup didn't help matters. To be fair, I thought Barrymore was best in the younger Edie sequences, when she wasn't so stuck re-creating scenes and attitudes from the Maysles film.

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Watched it. Liked it. Didn't love it.
There's no substitute for the original.

"It was worth it!"

You won't be sorry. They have some of the best programming you can get on tv!

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Loved them both.

Reminds me that we don't see Lange nearly enough. I love her work in films no one saw or liked -- i.e. LOSING ISAIAH; she was riveting in that.

This is a remarkable project -- rather daring in many ways -- and to me, it worked, all of it.

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I was impressed with Jessica Lange's makeup through it's progression. As soon as they started aging her, she began to look like Big Edie. Pretty incredible.

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"As soon as they started aging her, she began to look like Big Edie. Pretty incredible."

Yes, that's true. She looked like Jessica Lange before she aged, and the more makeup they applied, the more she disappeared into the character.

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I fell in love with Jessica Lange in Frances back in the eighties. This movie made me remember why I love her! She did layer Big Edie's character with depth of emotion which really moved me. Her final line, "The movie says it all." was perfect!

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I look forward to a second viewing. Lange is simply extraordinary in charting the incremental descent into agoraphobia and self-delusion. Her call to NY to bring Edie home is heartbreaking. As is the moment when she defiantly tells the attny's she'll only leave GG feet first.

And to my thinking, no one has sufficiently appreciated the Jackie's visit sequence -- one of Barrymore's finest in the film. Her raw vulnerability and palpable envy -- and oh, the brief moment of touching of Jackie's hair! I was overcome watching her. All of the elements in the story come together in that one scene. Did it happen that way? Probably not (neither did Elizabeth and Mary), but it clearly captured the essence of Jackie's intervention.

The challenges in this material are daunting, but I believe everyone involved pulled it off, brilliantly.

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From everything I have read about the Bouviers and Beales, Jackie felt true and deep affection for Big Edie. So I found the scene when Little Edie leaves Jackie and her mother to talk a believable recreation of what could have occurred between the two women. At that moment, both Jackie and Big Edie show real affection for one another and a vulnerability that human beings--not "icons"--generate. I love that scene.

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Auggie, I also find it interesting that the most painful (in a good way) parts of the movie are those to which you refer. Perhaps it's because we don't have any other "versions" of them. They catch you off-guard because you are "unprepared" for them.

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The film even explains the cats in a believable way. Watching Lange gradually take to her bed, shut out the world, and live in the past, via scrapbooks and memorabilia, is devastating. We know where it's heading, and as the vestiges of a connected existence begin to fade away, there's real tragedy. The movie is not a dirge, however. The stuff that's funny -- and they are funny, these women -- is still there. But it's all fully, artfully explored, so that we understand the stakes in their agoraphobic responses to the culture they bar themselves from. Such an intelligent, genuinely thought-out and carefully built telling. I'm very impressed with the screenplay.

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Updated On: 4/20/09 at 07:37 PM

I LOVED that the black and red scarf that Edie wears for the infamous flag twirling scene is the scarf that Jackie inadvertently leaves behind during her visit. She loses it in the garden and next we see Edie, its on her head.

Im sure that's not historically accurate, but a nice touch nonetheless.

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