Grey Gardens: Starring Jessica Lange, Drew Barrymore, Ken Howard. Directed by Michael Sucsy, written by Sucsy and Patricia Rozema. 8 p.m. Sat., with encore broadcasts, on HBO. "Grey Gardens," the 1975 documentary by Albert and David Maysles about Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, "Little Edie," made a big splash at the time of its release because the two women living in splendid squalor in East Hampton were relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Yet, as great as the Maysleses' film was, it focused on only six weeks in the Beales' lives. For the rest of the story, turn tonight to HBO's superb feature film, also called "Grey Gardens," which not only re-creates scenes from the documentary but also flashes back in the Beales' lives to give us a bit more insight into why two wealthy and well-connected women shut themselves up in a filthy mansion, littered with garbage and cat feces. Whether you know the Maysleses' film or not, you'll be astounded
at the performances of Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as Big and Little Edie. In fact, let's not mince words here: Barrymore has sometimes been a pleasing personality in various films, but never, in anything she's ever done, was there a hint that she was capable of a performance like this one. She eerily replicates not only Little Edie's very odd manner of speaking (an aural mashup of Bronx-ese and tony finishing school) but also her disconcerting air of studied detachment as well. It's less of a surprise that Lange is just as good, but what she looks like in the part is a surprise: stringy white hair, thick-lensed glasses askew on her face, blackened and crooked teeth. Lange brings extraordinary power to Big Edie, showing her fear-fueled stubbornness, which, we quickly realize, is the reason she shut herself away from the world to begin with and dragged her daughter back from New York for company. The film also benefits from spot-on work by Ken Howard as Edith's husband, Phelan; Malcolm Gets as Edith's sycophantic piano accompanist in her younger days; and Jeanne Tripplehorn as Jacqueline Onassis. People who watched the Maysleses' documentary when it came out probably found the women strange, to say the least, but may have also felt sympathy for them in the end. That's the feeling that director 
and co-screenwriter Michael Sucsy is going for in the HBO film, and he achieves it in spades. Yes, at first, the Beales strike us as true oddballs. There's Big Edie, shuffling around the crumbling mansion with various articles of clothing tied around her body, commenting indifferently that a cat is urinating behind a portrait of her younger self propped against the bedroom wall. She bickers constantly with Little Edie, who tries to hide her bald head with a variety of sweaters, blouses and towels, tied like Renaissance headpieces at the nape of her neck, while musing that she'll probably never be able to leave Grey Gardens until her mother dies.Source: sfgate.com
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