The Wealth and Glam of “The Hamptons” Looks Almost Quaint

The documentary consists of a collection of short vignettes, arranged according to summer’s chronological unfolding, and features a cast of recurring characters. There’s the longtime police lieutenant, and the local career fishermen, and the seafood caterers, and the waitresses at a local restaurant—a couple of party-happy Irish girls, and a beleaguered Australian. There’s the slick, glad-handing publisher of Hamptons magazine, and the feisty Citarella market scion who would love to have her picture featured in its pages. Then there are the young city professionals shacking up in summer rentals, as many as eight to a room, eight to a hot tub: Jacqueline, a flirty lawyer looking to find a husband; Angela, a shy investment banker who isn’t sure if the share-house experiment is for her; and Josh, a fun-loving guy who calls himself an entrepreneur but mostly seems to occupy himself with picking up girls. Then, there’s Marilee the farmer, and the gimlet-eyed Gaines, a classic insider-outsider figure who wrote the Hamptons history “Philistines at the Hedgerow,” and who explains to Kopple and, by extension, to us, Who’s Who in the Hamptons cosmology.

Among those denizens are, of course, the famous or at least notable: the supermodel Christie Brinkley and her ex-husband, the musician Billy Joel; the polo-playing businessman and art collector Adam Lindemann; the hoteliers Rick and Kathy Hilton and their still teen-age daughters, Paris and Nicky; the “Sex and the City” author Candace Bushnell; the hip-hop moguls Russell Simmons and Sean (Diddy) Combs; and the celebrity publicist Lizzie Grubman, whom the camera begins to follow mere days before a dispute with a bouncer led her to back up her father’s Mercedes S.U.V. into a crowd outside the Conscience Point Inn night club, and injure sixteen people, resulting in a summer-long tabloid furor. (Grubman subsequently pleaded guilty to felony and misdemeanor charges and served a thirty-eight-day jail sentence.)

Kopple’s documentary is a time capsule, offering a concentrated taste of an earlier moment in American culture, now resolutely over. To watch the proud father of the Hamptons publisher leafing through the magazine’s June issue, bragging that “this is a pretty thick book, four-hundred-plus pages,” or party-animal Josh asking a woman he meets whether she has a cellphone so that he can give her his number, or girls dancing at the club—their hair flat-ironed, their tight-fitting going-out tops just kissing the waists of their low-rise designer denims, their tiny shoulder bags tucked securely under their arms—is to feel oneself being tossed back on the waves of time. As a friend I was discussing “The Hamptons” with noted, too, “the most startling part about this documentary is how normal everyone’s face looks.” Botox hadn’t even been F.D.A.-approved yet. Were we ever so young?

This peek into the relatively recent past is delightful fun, except when it starts to feel distinctly melancholic. So many mostly unfortunate things have happened since Kopple shot her documentary. This is true, for starters, in the celebrity realm: at a Fourth of July baseball tournament between the Roc-A-Fella and Bad Boy record labels which Kopple shows, players include the riding-high, since-disgraced and jailed Diddy; the starlet Tara Reid, who’d come to spend much of the next twenty-five years in seeming party-girl decline; and the singer Aaliyah, who’d die in a tragic plane crash the following month, at only twenty-two. Grubman, too, is front and center, less than seventy-two hours before the brutal events at Conscious Point would take place.

The Grubman scandal, especially, serves as a harbinger of darkness to come. The apparent class disparity and aggression on display—the wealthy and well-connected Grubman allegedly told the club’s bouncer, “Fuck you, white trash,” before she accelerated into the crowd—have only become more pronounced in American life over the past generation. The media circus that erupted in the wake of the accident, too (the New York Post, in particular, was like a dog with a bone with l’affaire Grubman), practically seems like child’s play when we consider the near-psychosis-inducing coverage of every single moment of every single person’s life that we’re now exposed to 24/7, not only via the tabloids but via smartphones and social media. Kopple’s Hamptons—even with its endless velvet ropes and parties and Jacuzzis—is positively quaint in comparison. (A party thrown by Christie Brinkley even has paper plates.)