Last fall, scribegrrrl assessed some of the most bizarre casting news ever, Drew Barrymore as Little Edie in Grey Gardens. That’s the documentary-turned-musical about the relatives of Jackie Kennedy whose lives, dreams, and house decay in one of the most truly uncomfortable things I’ve ever seen. I wholeheartedly agree: I don’t see Barrymore – whose on-screen presence is brilliantly suited for cutesy-romantic and cutesy-badass roles – playing Edith Beale without coming across as, well, just cutesy. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the crazy-making documentary-turned-musical, here’s some perspective. In a more comprehensible choice, Jessica Lange, you might recall, is playing the mother. Personally, I’m still trying to understand why we need a dramatized version at all, when you can just rent the documentary. (That is, if you feel like being depressed. Or are depressed, and want to make yourself feel better by comparison.)
But Barrymore and Vogue have been working to convince the skeptics that she’s up for it and, in fact, grown-up enough for it. Among other revelations, director Michael Sucsy recounts how Barrymore hunted him down, making her case accompanied by an inches-thick binder of her personal Little Edie collection. I do understand the fascination with Edie, a S-T-A-U-N-C-H woman:
For her part, in the interview Barrymore discusses the process of the film, from makeup to accent to mental readiness. Since Edie has about two decades on Drew, it took five hours of makeup, wigs, and prosthetics to transform her. She also signed on for months of dialect coaching to master the speech cadences of a Long Island debutant from the 1930s. This, she says, was the hardest part for a Valley Girl: “In those days, there were no R’s. I talk out of the side of my mouth, and she talks from the back of her throat. It’s really a different language.”
Then there was the mental makeover. Barrymore gave up everything 21st-century – cell, computer, and all – except for her treadmill:
“I have never been so cut off from the world before, but I wanted to feel like I had only what was right in front of me. I was really conscious of creating an environment that I constantly wanted to get out of. There was a lot of pain and frustration and lack of comfort. That’s who she [Edie] was.”
And Barrymore feels she learned lessons about more than history or one woman’s life: “Something about learning you can live without everything changes you. All my life, I’ve been waiting and waiting to become a woman, but I always felt like a little girl. Edie did, too. But I think she might have been the thing that made me finally become a woman. I thought for sure it would be a relationship with another human being, a love. Little did I know it would be a posthumous relationship with a woman named Edith Beale.”
Waiting to become a woman? Hey, maybe that’s what Oprah and Drew were talking about
the other day, when Oprah gushed that being selected to do a Vogue cover was thrilling because “it’s some kind of validation; it says you’re a real woman.” Huh? But kudos to Barrymore for donating one million dollars to the World Food Programme. I’m happy for Barrymore. She’s pulling big salaries as an actress and producing commercially successful movies, and it sounds like her time on this project was not easy. But call me a cynic. This “coming-of-age” slant sort of makes me a little queasy. Of course, that could be because of Vogue‘s frequent gushing over Barrymore’s healthy new relationship, healthy new perspective on life, and healthy new thin body. And it still doesn’t convince me that she can play the role.
I’ll finish off here with an extended clip from the original documentary. If you’ve never seen the film, and you can make it through the first few minutes, see what you think.
Make me a liar, Drew. I really hope you can pull it off.
