Barbara Kopple — two-time Oscar winner for her labor-dispute documentaries “Harlan County U.S.A.” and “American Dream” — spent the summer of 2001 filming the Hamptons. The result, recently re-streamed on Le Cinema Club, is an observational mosaic that catches a world on the edge of transformation.
Naomi Fry’s Critic’s Notebook piece reads the documentary as a time capsule of pre-9/11, pre-Botox, pre-smartphone America:
- Kopple’s cast includes farmers descended from whaling captains, local fishermen, Irish waitresses, party-hearty city professionals, and celebrities like Paris Hilton, Christie Brinkley, and a pre-scandal Diddy
- The film refuses the talking-head formula — Kopple lets meaning emerge slowly from everyday scenes
- Fry contrasts the relatively modest 2001 Hamptons (Christie Brinkley’s party serving on paper plates) with today’s ultra-lavish billionaire culture designed for Instagram flexing
- The Lizzie Grubman incident — a publicist backing her SUV into a crowd after telling a bouncer “Fuck you, white trash” — is read as an early signal of the class aggression now normalized in American life
The article’s sharpest observation: the documentary was shot months before 9/11. Watching the heaving crowds of tan, drunk youths at Neptune Beach Club, Fry notes the dramatic irony of knowing what’s coming. One character muses on-camera that “this one second in time is gonna be looked back on as a really golden age.”
Kopple’s talent has always been letting class tensions surface without lecturing. “The Hamptons” does that — and, watched now, it’s also a record of how much more gauche and brutal American wealth has become in just one generation.