Slumming Expedition

By JAY COCKS

GREY GARDENS

Directed by DAVID MAYSLES, ALBERT MAYSLES, ELLEN HOVDE and MUFFIE MEYER

It seems farfetched, but this is a documentary. Grey Gardens, a new cinema verite creation of the Maysles brothers (Gimme Shelter, Salesman), concerns the dilapidated lives of Edith Beale, 79, and her daughter Edie, 56. Both women live in East Hampton, Long Island, performing some dizzy charade out of The Madwoman of Chaillot. Grey Gardens, the crumbling house they inhabit, is overrun by raccoons, squirrels and other woodland creatures. The two women live mostly in one room, where the beds .are covered with cans of cat food, the floors ankle-deep in garbage. Occasionally a handyman named Jerry drops by for a visit.

Grey Gardens might also be called Edie's Complaint. Edie is afraid her mother will ask Jerry to move in. Edie does not think her mother is fair to her. She never gets to have any friends. Her mother chased away her only serious suitor years before.

Both women show the film makers albums full of old photographs in which they are regal and rather beautiful. Edith sings. So does Edie. The summer is about to end. Edie confides that her mother, against all evidence, is "a lot of fun. I hope she doesn't die. I don't want to spend another winter here, though."

Mrs. Beale and Edie are respectively the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Onassis, and so a certain notoriety has attached itself to their situation. The town fathers of East Hampton tried to have them evicted from Grey Gardens on the grounds--richly demonstrated in the film -- that the house is a menace to health. The Beales fought a well-publicized battle and stayed, although this fight is not the subject of the film. It is difficult to ascertain what the subject of the film really is, or the reason it was made. The Maysles brothers have al ways been inveterate seekers after the phantom of documentary "truth." This quest has been hampered by the peculiar insularity of their vision and by its glib spontaneity. In Grey Gardens they do not mean to be cruel to the Beales, al though they are. The movie has some slender justification as a piece of psychological reporting, about the ways two people rely on each other and torture each other. But all we see -- perhaps all anyone could ever see -- are the bitter ness and the desperation, not how and why they began. Without the powers of art to enrich and transform, Grey Gardens remains an aimless act of ruptured privacy and an exploitation.

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