Beyond Greenaway Documentary Gets Audience Talking

Like a majority of the 79 people who screened Sue Gilbert’s documentary “Beyond Greenaway,” former Mercer Island resident Helen Stanwell is anxious to compare and contrast another film in Mercer Island Arts Council’s “Economies of Scale” series, “Born Rich” with the film she just watched.

“Your siblings (and their children) were making their lives vital, which I found so uplifting, while I found “Born Rich” depressing, because they weren’t doing anything with their lives or their wealth…they were rootless, adrift” said Stanwell. “Of course, they didn’t have your mother!”

Through the laughter, Gilbert responds, “My parents insisted that we work--though she was an heiress, my mother worked as a nurse. We weren’t lavished with gifts, and only had a small allowance—it was encouraged that we earned what we needed, and we passed those values on to our children.”

“We don’t identify with the upper class in our family,” adds Skye Gilbert, Sue’s daughter. “None of us are members of a country club, except for one guy who married into the family and likes golf.”

“I was surprised that the film wasn’t boring, and it wasn’t self indulgent, when it easily could have been,” said Michele Diafos, a Bellevue resident. “I was pleasantly surprised with how engaging it was, with all that insight into her family and their lives,” adds Michele’s friend Sue J.

“I loved that the (second generation of) family turned out to be fairly normal…wealth didn’t influence their lives except to make them more philanthropic,” said Sandy Tomlin of Shoreline. “It was my assumption that wealthy people weren’t like Sue’s family. This film gave us a different viewpoint on how wealthy families could be, the hidden side of wealth you don’t see in the mainstream media.”

Beyond Greenaway: The Legacy, written, directed and produced by former Mercer Island resident Sue Gilbert, takes scenes from its predecessor, “Greenaway,” a film about her parents that Gilbert produced and directed in 1981, and adds interviews with her siblings Mary, Racey, Lee, John and Dan about their lives growing up wealthy on a private Island off the Connecticut coast. While Sue found herself working in film in California and came out as a lesbian (but not to her conservative parents), her brother Dan found his life unfolding like the British TV series “Upstairs Downstairs” and Racey gets kicked off the Island for taking part in the march on Washington in 1964. Brother John gets involved in Civil war reenactments, Lee becomes a musician and sister Mary becomes an actress. Sue talks about the isolation that she and her brother Dan, who came along 5 years after their other 4 siblings, felt, but how it brought them closer together because they’d learned to sail and discover the outdoors on Greenaway Island together. Throughout the film, scenes of their mother’s descent into madness are interwoven with their father’s near-worship of their mother and his development of a cocoon of privilege and Victorian values insulating his family.

Mrs. Gilbert, the family matriarch, steals the show with her bizarre political paranoia and spiritual beliefs derived from years of Freudian therapy and regular use of LSD. “Mother became a rabid conservative,” said Sue in the film’s narration, “She considered Nixon too far to the left and hatched a plot with some friends to kidnap him.” Though unsuccessful, Mrs. Gilbert opines several times in the film that the socialists and communists in government and huge corporations will “turn us all into slaves.”

In 1987, six years after his wife’s death, Mr. Gilbert, overwhelmed by the upkeep of Greenaway, sold the Island and moved close enough to be able to see his home of 30 years from his window.  Yet the legacy of Greenaway, the wealthy lifestyle, has made the Gilbert sons and daughters, as well as grandchildren, into thoughtful, caring people devoted to philanthropy. “It all boils down to one basic thing with wealth, values,” said Gilbert. “You can have great poor people or bad poor people. The real question is are your values helping you become a deeper, richer person, are they helping you help the world?”

Greenaway and Beyond Greenaway are available for purchase from www.beyondgreenaway.com.