Grey Gardens (2009)

  This is an HBO film based on a 1975 documentary about the lives of Edith and Little Edie Bouvier-Beale, the cousins of Jackie Onassis who lived in a decaying mansion in the East Hamptons.

Honestly, this may have been the first episode of Hoarders.  The house ends up a falling-down wreck with garbage piled everywhere, half a hundred cats, and raccoons roaming free.  It's so bad that a pair of documentarians come down to interview them as kind of a counterpoint to the jet-setting life of their cousins Jackie Onassis and Lee Radziwell.

But I get ahead of myself.  Edith Bouvier (Big Edie) came from money and pursued a career as a singer. She married a lawyer and had three kids.  The eldest, Little Edie, also wanted to be a performer.  The lawyer eventually got tired of paying for everything and divorced Big Edie.  She got Grey Gardens, their summer place.  Little Edie moved to Manhattan to pursue a career.  Big Edie was incredibly insane, however, and sabotaged her daughter's burgeoning independence by ratting out her affair with the Secretary of the Interior to her dad, which causes him to cut off her allowance, necessitating her return to Grey Gardens.

From that point, their relationship starts to resemble Joan Crawford and Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?  To make matters worse, Little Edie has alopecia, a medical condition that makes her hair fall out, that worsens with stress.  Hence the turbans.

The two of them are incapable of caring for the mansion so it falls into a horrible state of disrepair.  Desperate for company, the two invite a lurking photographer in and let him take pictures.  These end up splashed across The National Enquirer, claiming that Jackie O neglects her relatives. The Health Department shows up and condemns the property for failing every standard.

Jackie Onassis and her husband pay for the restoration to livable conditions, and to cart off half a ton of garbage.  That's when the documentarians show up and start filming all the craziness.

This movie was really distressing for me to watch, considering that it was based on real events.  Drew Barrymore is delightful and Jessica Lange is a great actress but nothing was going to keep me from being incredibly creeped out by the clinging desperation and disturbing co-dependency of these two women.