The Road to Grey Gardens
If I’m lucky, once or maybe twice a year I’ll see a film I enjoy enough to want to add the DVD to my permanent collection. I Netflix-ed the HBO Grey Gardens film last week and I’ve been haunted by it ever since. It’s not necessarily a flawless film, but it’s a fully fascinating one. It admirably attempts to explain what the 1970s documentary by the same name did not – how did two high society sweethearts, close relatives of Jackie O., stumble into such sad and suffocating squalor?
The HBO film arrives close to answering this question, and yet the reason why I keep thinking about the piece is because it doesn’t completely add up. It’s not explained, entirely, what happened to those women, or why it happened, rather. But maybe if their strange story could be explained and utterly understood then it wouldn’t be so fascinating anymore.
