Michael Musto's review of The Beales for The Village Voice

From Village Voice, on Michael Musto, on 21 August 2006

La Dolce Musto

I found my rock bottom last week when I dragged my sorry ass to the Material Girls party and was denied interviews with those illustrious sisters of darkness, Hillary and Haylie Duff. Can you imagine the degradation? And I was all set to quote an imdb.com user who said the film's incredibly special ("one of the five worst I've ever seen"). Fine, girls—your loss.

Even the dead Beales—that whack mother-daughter act of fallen socialites popularized in Grey Gardens—were more inviting when I went to the party for Albert Maysles's new release of found footage, The Beales of Grey Gardens. The fashion-forward dingbats were yacking away at me nonstop—from a TV monitor—as Maysles told me that Edie wasn't nuts at all, she was just in a teensy bit of an elliptical orbit. "I'm a psychologist," he said. "I worked at a mental hospital. Crazy she's not. The Times called her crazy and she wrote a letter in response. She's so much a poet, such a brilliant defender of her sanity!" And the fact she and mom owned not a single television, he feels, is irrefutable proof of their clarity of vision.

Maysles's next documentary will cover something truly crazy—blood libel, whereby Jews have long been wrongly accused of killing Christian children to drink their blood for Passover. (Only Howard Stern does that, I'm pretty sure.) Maysles told me the Hezbollah puts out propaganda films claiming this shit is true, and his film will counter it by centering on "the 1913 trial of Mendel Beilis in anti-Semitic czarist Russia." "That'll have them lining up at the cineplex," I cracked, and he laughed politely.

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