This documentary follows the lives of Big and Little Edie Beale, a mother and daughter, who lived as recluses in their family mansion in East Hampton, NY from the mid-50s through the late 70s. By the time the filmmakers find them, the mansion is falling apart, and the women, one 78 and the other 56, share a squalid room. The older Edie Beale is the aunt of Jackie Kennedy Onassis and the younger is her first cousin. The women were originally going to be evicted from the house due to its decrepit condition, but Jackie sent them money for repairs so they could keep living there.

At times this movie can seem exploitative, as neither woman seems in the best of mental health, but at other times, the movie is hard to look away from. "Little" Edie blames her mother for her current state, and her mother fires back that Edie was never going to be the success she thought she was. "Little" Edie often seems trapped in the past, focused on choices she made decades ago, and loves showing off pictures from her youth, where she clearly was a beautiful debutante. Her mother seems more resigned to her fate, to live out the rest of her life in terrible conditions. There are definite hints of the glamorous life both women once lead, from the pictures that show a happy family, to the grand portrait of the older Edie next to her bed. From what we see of the house, most of the rooms in it are empty, the walls are cracking and falling apart, and "Little" Edie leaves food in the attic for the racoons to feast on. And of course there are numerous cats running around.

At its heart, this documentary is incredibly sad. While neither woman seems particularly depressed by their lot in life, the squalor they live in is utterly awful. It's not particularly clear if there is even running water in the house, and you get the impression that they have essentially been abandoned by their family.

However, as a documentary, the film is a wonder to behold, and is highly recommended.

If you or I lived in a creaking house-of-horror with utilities cut-off and raccoons in the kitchen, we'd be jailed in short order. But if you're Jackie Kennedy's aunt, the rules don't apply. That is the appeal of this film, the bohemian snob-life - too good to be correct.

Grey Gardens had been an elegant mansion of East Hampton when the aunt (Edith Beale) first lived there in 1924, but it had been slowly collapsing all around her, as she divorced her husband and then invited her unmarried daughter (Little Edie) to live with her, mostly grumbling and bickering along the way, if we are to believe this documentary. And no, they were not moving out, whatever the local hygiene department said.

The producers have tried to turn it into a pantomime, and the two ladies seem happy to play up to it. Both had clearly been glamorous in their day, Little E. making sure you notice an impressive pair of pins at fifty-six, and even her mother still showing signs of good bone structure. (Plenty of lingering close-ups of early portraits serve to ram the point home further.)

But the daughter had lost her hair early-on, possibly by setting it on fire, though she claims it was alopecia, sentencing her to a lifetime in headscarves. In any case, her brand of prettiness did not mature comfortably, and she remained a visibly dissatisfied woman. Empty face. Empty life.

The time-warp aspect is deliberately dramatised, with a lot of old records (78 rpm) brought out from their sleeves, 'Tea for Two' being an over-obvious code for nostalgic listening, and the pair of them performing their own dreadful renderings of Cole Porter and Rodgers & Hammerstein.

How they stood twenty-five years of this is beyond me. I found ninety minutes of it quite enough.

An old mother and her middle-aged daughter, the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, live their eccentric lives in a filthy, decaying mansion in East Hampton.

Plenty has been written and said about the Kennedy family, and Irish political dynasties, but far less is out there about the Bouvier (?) family... and these odd black sheep of the family make me want to know more. I had never heard of them. How is that possible? This documentary has been floating around for forty years, and is really mandatory viewing for anyone who is interested in either Kennedy, the Hamptons or mental illness.

"Big Edie" died in 1977 and "Little Edie" sold the house in 1979 for $220,000 to Sally Quinn and her husband, former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee,[7] who promised to restore the dilapidated structure (the sale agreement forbade razing the house). "Little Edie" died in Florida in 2002 at the age of 84. According to a 2003 article in Town & Country, after their purchase, Quinn and Bradlee completely restored the house and grounds.