The house was beautiful once, and so were the Beales. They look through old scrapbooks, this woman of 82 and her 56-year-old daughter, and we see them when they were the cream of society....Now a slow disintegration has set in; rooms of their mansion and areas of their lives have been closed off, one at a time, left to the forages of raccoons and memories. Still, they've preserved a few things, while abandoning so much. They still have wit, style and what I would define as sanity. "Grey Gardens," one of the most haunting documentaries in a long time, preserves their strange existence, and we're pleased that it does. It expands our notions of the possibilities. It's about two classic eccentrics, two people who refuse to live the way they're supposed to, but by the film's end we see that they live fully, in ways of their own choosing.