Grey Gardens (HBO)

Reviewer: Amy Monaghan
Rating (out of 5): ***½

"What happened?" It's a question that's haunted fans of the cult classic Grey Gardens ever since David and Albert Maysles' cinema verité portrait of Big Edie and Little Edie debuted in 1975. The HBO original movie Grey Gardens endeavors to show just how this mother-daughter duo ended up living like a cross between the Collyer brothers and Miss Havisham in a derelict mansion in the Hamptons by filling in the Bouvier Beale women's glittering Park Avenue pasts. So we see mother Edie canoodling with a sybaritic music teacher straight out of 1930s screwball comedies like The Awful Truth and My Man Godfrey, as well as what happens after her husband leaves her. Young Edie escorts her little cousin Jacqueline Bouvier to the beach before lighting out for Manhattan, where she aspires to be an actress and falls in love with a married man. Edie never does find an appropriate beau from the exclusive Maidstone Club to marry. Instead she is summoned home to resume the suffocating codependent relationship she tried to flee.

The camera is prone to cross-cutting from one woman's face to the other, the better to capture their symbiotic relationship. Narrative leaps backward and forward across the decades serve to underscore how far these two women have fallen by the early 1970s, when the filmmaking Maysles brothers come into their diminished lives.

Those who enter this Grey Gardens already knowing every delightful catch-phrase Little Edie utters will appreciate the scrupulous fidelity devoted to replicating the sets, props, outrageous costumes, dialogue, and framing first seen in the documentary. Even the way these women must smell is almost visible on screen-perfumed but with the sharpness of pungent rot underneath. Gardens also holds up well enough as an introduction for the uninitiated; a cautionary tale about how even the most privileged "pure products of America / go crazy."

Jessica Lange, who has known from crazy since 1982's Frances, plays Big Edie with the finely honed precision one would expect. But the real revelation here is Drew Barrymore as Little Edie. Another dynastic scion with an overbearing mother, Barrymore usually lets her jutting family chin and soft lisping voice do most of the acting for her, but not here. She nails Little Edie's patrician Long Island-lockjaw accent without once slipping into the sort of exaggeration drag queens have affected for decades in fond homage to their fellow outsider. Barrymore deftly captures what made Edie Beale "a staunch character. S-T-A-U-N-C-H" like no other.

No doubt due to the existence of the original Maysles doc and the additional footage Al Maysles released as The Beales of Grey Gardens in 2006, the DVD extras are slight. There's a commentary track and a brief making-of that shows the care that cast and crew devoted to recreating the East Hampton house that gave both the documentary and this fictional take their titles. Be sure to watch through the closing credits.