‘That Summer’ revisits the Beales of ‘Grey Gardens,’ pointlessly
“Grey Gardens,” the 1976 documentary by Albert and David Maysles, was a one-of-a-kind film that profiled the strange lives of Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edie Bouvier Beale, relatives of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy who were former society dames living as eccentric hermits in a dilapidated mansion in the Hamptons on Long Island.
The film, considered to be one of the Maysles brothers’ masterpieces, has been marked for preservation by the Library of Congress, and spawned an Albert Maysles sequel, “The Beales of Grey Gardens” (2006), a 2006 Broadway musical and a 2009 HBO film adaptation starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore.