Grey Gardens [is] an extraordinarily crafty invasion into the lives of Edith Beale and her daughter Edie, better known as Jacqueline Onassis's impoverished aunt and first cousin, whose own fallen estate in East Hampton, Long Island, made gossipy headlines a few years ago. After a Wellesian nod to those headlines and the local scandal that generated them, and after a graceful, passing admission of their own presence as filmmakers, the Maysles brothers prowl the dilapidated Beale manse with an unblinking cool—underscored by an ironic, growing compassion—that achieves what cinéma vérité aims for but seldom conveys: a sense that the material is telling itself.

In the course of the film's feature-length running time, that material becomes hypnotic—as much so as the story of the stunted lives of Miss Havisham and her ward Estelle in Great Expectations, or of Faulkner's ghoulish spinster in "A Rose...