You can smell cat piss and mothballs right through the screen in this weirdly haunting documentary from the Maysles brothers. Its subjects are Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, mother and daughter, aunt and cousin to Jackie Onassis, former lookers from wealthy stock who made the scene in their day, now two aged recluses in a crumbling old mansion.
What money they have seems to come in mere droplets from the family. It’s not nearly enough for the upkeep on a 14-room manor, now festooned with ravaged walls, dirty floors, garbage and raccoon shit. The Beales live all but forgotten by everyone except for the East Hampton, New York building code inspectors who threaten forced eviction if they let the dump get much worse.
The house is a supporting character here, as well as a mirror image of the Beales (as are the lounging cats), but it never overshadows the two women themselves. The Maysles struck gold with this pair. Still aristocratic in their minds, the Beales are not intimidated by the camera and talk freely. Little Edie, age 56, she of the constant head scarf (the condition of her hair is never seen here), in particular, can yap all day and night about her past, her dreams and the potential husbands that got away thirty years ago. There’s little room here for a viewer to take the middle ground. You either hate these two withering dandelions who’ve never had a day of responsibility in their lives and now they live mired in old memories and who gives a fuck, or you get sucked into the tragedy of it all, its faded dreams, its broken beauty and its one-way dead end street in a life that looked like it was going to be perfect.