The movie Ben Wheatley called “a lesson in looseness”
Ben Wheatley has built up an impressive career over the last 15 years or so. Taking charge of one of the best horror-thrillers of the 21st century with Kill List, the director followed it up with the brilliantly dark comedy Sightseers in 2012. Alongside them sit other excellent movies within Wheatley’s filmography, including A Field in England and In the Earth, to name but a few.
During a feature with Criterion, Wheatley once offered a peak behind the creative curtain and named his top ten films of all time. Amongst them was a movie that he called “a lesson in looseness” because of the laidback, almost unstructured approach that the director and film crew take to portraying dialogue and narrative advancement.
Wheatley said of the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens: “A lesson in looseness for me. The camera wanders around and witnesses the house and the women. Dialogue happens off-camera often, and nothing really happens, and yet it’s fascinating. Not one car explodes.”
The film was directed by Albert Maysles and his brother David Maysles, as well as Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer. It focuses on a pair of reclusive, upper-class women who live a life of poverty in a ramshackle mansion in the affluent Georgica Pond area of East Hampton, New York.
The two women are mother and daughter. Edith Ewing ‘Big Edie’ Bouvier Beale was born in 1895, and her daughter Edith ‘Little Edie’ Bouvier Beale was born in 1917. They were the aunt and cousin of the ex-First Lady of the United States, Jacqueline Kenney Onassis, but despite their former glory, they decided to live in reclusive poverty for several decades at the Grey Gardens estate.
The house was bought by Big Edie and her husband, Phelan Beale, but by the early 1970s, it had fallen into disrepair. There was no running water, and the place was overrun with cats, raccoons and fleas, not to mention the sheer amount of litter and decay. The Beale ladies were subject to potential eviction before Jacqueline Onassis helped to repair to house according to living codes.
Eventually, the Maysles brothers discovered their story via the National Enquirer and New York Magazine and requested permission to film. The resultant documentary is highly-acclaimed, mostly for the way it captures reality naturally and allows the two women to tell their stories themselves without interference.
However, the film also drew criticism, with some claiming that there was a level of exploitation present in the film. When Albert Maysles was asked about exploiting the Beales and their suspected mental illness, he replied, “As someone with a background in psychology, I knew better than to claim [the Beales] were mentally ill.”
He added: “Their behaviour was just their way of asserting themselves. And what could be a better way to assert themselves than a film about them asserting themselves? Nothing more, nothing less. It’s just them. They were always in control.”
