***½/****
starring Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton
screenplay by Samy Burch
directed by Todd Haynes
by Angelo Muredda “You just don’t know with these Hollywood types,” Julianne Moore’s wilted Southern belle Gracie says early in Todd Haynes’s intricate hothouse melodrama, May December. She’s referring, by way of a throwaway reference to a prior encounter with Judge Judy, to the impending visit at her idyllic Savannah, Georgia home by Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a TV actress who’s about to play her in a movie about the defining event of her life more than twenty years prior. Gracie is a tabloid celebrity, famous for her exploitative sexual relationship with a 12-year-old boy, for which she served time in prison. Improbably, she’s also a proud matriarch, having married and built a home with her victim, Joe (Charles Melton), who now finds himself an empty nester at the ripe age of 36, as the couple’s twin children, born while she was in prison, prepare to go off to college. Loosely inspired by the story of sex offender Mary Kay Letourneau, who went on to marry and start a family with the victim of her abuse until their separation in 2019, May December isn’t a work of true crime so much as a playful, sly, tonally restless exploration of Gracie’s observation about the unknowability of Hollywood folks, which turns out to be broadly applicable to the unfathomable nature of everyone, including herself and her partner.
Elizabeth’s weeklong fact-finding expedition into Gracie’s motivations makes her something of an ideal audience surrogate at first. Like the actress doing background work into her problematic character, who inspires equal parts loyalty from the neighbours–who regularly buy up her meticulously crafted cobblers (shades of Haynes’s Mildred Pierce)–and disdain from those who leave boxes full of human excrement at her doorstep, the viewer cautiously tiptoes into Gracie’s carefully managed domestic life, which has every appearance of being normal apart from the elephant in the room: a husband who barely looks older than their teen children. We furtively poke around her home care of DP Christopher Blauvelt’s slinking camerawork and unfussy compositions, picking up on her children’s and husband’s bad vibes. Only occasionally do we break free of Gracie’s artificial bubble, as when Elizabeth does extracurricular research: reading tabloids about Gracie and making note of her personality traits, speaking to Gracie’s damaged queer son Georgie (a very funny Cory Michael Smith), and eventually getting off in the pet-store stockroom while she daydreams herself into the primal scene of Gracie’s crime. As that surrogate fantasy suggests, the more Elizabeth participates in her life, as Gracie puts it, getting closer to the truth of her character (or at least her take on her), the more her motivations and narcissistic traits ripen and then rot, to the point where she’s actively courting Joe and fielding business propositions from Georgie, a Peter Frampton cover artist who hilariously promises to share insights about his mother in exchange for a job as a music supervisor on the movie.
In its pulpy psychological profiles of two carefully-presented women on the edge of self-knowledge, May December feels of a piece with Carol and Mildred Pierce. Where those genre-spiced two-handers about generational tensions between women originated as adaptations of popular pulp texts, May December stems from a ripped-from-the-headlines premise courtesy of screenwriter Samy Burch. Despite its original pedigree, the film feels no less richly intertextual–and thus, paradoxically, no less Haynesian–than his earlier riffs on Chantal Akerman (Safe), Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Far From Heaven), and Nicolas Roeg and Jean-Luc Godard (I’m Not There). Between its direct-address monologues, its play with mirrors and doppelgängers, and its exploration of the psychological recesses of the mind of an actor, which we access in one remarkable scene where Elizabeth lectures a high-school drama class about the erotic slippages that happen between characters and actors when shooting a sex scene, Haynes’s aesthetic mood-board this time around feels particularly influenced by Ingmar Bergman’s persona-swap psychodramas.
Portman and Moore are more than up to the task of playing Haynes’s American bootlegs of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson from Persona. Apart from an early dramatic music cue as Gracie stands before her open fridge and realizes she’s running out of hot dogs, the closest the film gets to outright camp is in its explicit association between the masks the two women wear in a montage where Elizabeth studies her subject’s birdlike but steely movement (her words) in tabloids and interviews while Joe secretly watches a skincare commercial starring Elizabeth in another room. Haynes plays with our extra-textual associations with his actors, whose characters, when they first meet, are struck by their similarities in height, much as we are struck by their similarities as performers of a certain pedigree. Oscar winners separated by about twenty years, Portman and Moore have been widely celebrated as two of the best American actresses of their respective generations and ungenerously characterized by non-fans as mannered.
Here, the overelaborate performances they are asked to give are the point. Moore wears Gracie’s frailty and naivety as armour against any charges that she is an abuser fully in command of Joe’s destiny as well as her own. Her remote aura and soft, goofy lisp add a sting to her barbed moments, as when she parries Elizabeth’s smug account of how her mother wrote a book on epistemic relativism by saying that her mother “wrote a great recipe for blueberry cobblers.” Portman, for her part, continues to riff on the perception that she is an aloof, tightly-wound type, something previously winked at in Black Swan, where Vincent Cassel’s petty tyrant director chastises her character’s lack of sex appeal to a dancer played by Portman’s real-life partner, Benjamin Milepied–a moment so meta the actress referenced it in her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes. Portman relishes the nastier underbelly of her similarly high-strung performer here, abruptly shifting from playing Joe’s concerned keeper as she’s comforting him, the way a journalist might handle a fragile source, to cruelly dismissing their moment of intimacy as “just what grownups do.”
A solid, stoic type with only the most tentatively explored private life–a curious hobby of raising butterflies, and a secret running text-message relationship with a fellow amateur lepidopterist–Melton’s Joe is caught between the fussy, manicured presentation styles of the two women using him for their own mercenary ends, until he has a belated post-chrysalis glow-up in the genuinely discomfiting last act. The stately camera movement, all-caps score, and figuratively thick imagery of budding plants and butterflies emerging from cocoons might have become suffocating if not for the film’s timely perspectival shift to Joe, whose insecurities, past traumas, and future anxieties are awakened after he shares a secret puff of a joint on the roof with his son ahead of the latter’s graduation. The child becomes father to the man as his son looks on with concern while the still baby-faced Joe reverts to a vulnerable, childlike state, allowing himself to feel what’s happened to him, seemingly for the first time. Melton is both moving and funny in the grips of his weed-inspired breakthrough, blubbering, “I can’t tell if we’re connecting or if I’m creating a bad memory for you” as he sends his son off into a possible future he never had. It’s a powerful performance that rivals those of his more seasoned co-stars, quietly true in a film that’s largely about the artifice that often goes into crafting truth in performance, and a potent illustration of Gracie’s edict that you just don’t know about people.
