The filmmaker Todd Haynes discusses the messy morality of his new movie’s characters.
May December is not designed to provide easy answers. Todd Haynes’s new film stars Natalie Portman as an actor named Elizabeth who begins shadowing a woman who slept with a 13-year-old student in the 1990s, sparking a tabloid scandal. It’s a story obviously inspired by the Mary Kay Letourneau case, but it takes place in 2015 with the woman, Gracie (played by Julianne Moore), now out of prison, married to the now-adult Joe (Charles Melton) and raising their three children together. Over the course of the film, Elizabeth serves as an infiltrator and instigator, probing Gracie and Joe’s relationship as part of her research for a movie role. Their time together soon develops into a deliciously deceptive dance between two women carefully maintaining their own façades. And through it all, the film’s tone is hard to pin down, swerving between arch comedy and tense tragedy without ever giving the audience an obvious hero to root for.
Haynes was immediately intrigued by the ambiguity of the script, which was written by the relative newcomer Samy Burch and given to him via Portman in mid-2020. But the director was even more drawn in by its time frame, which avoided a re-creation of well-worn events and instead jumped ahead decades. “It had integrity; it had a real idea,” he told me. “Why would anyone tell the story about that? The uneventful part of the story? That’s exactly what [Burch] set out to do.”
The director is a master of stories about people reckoning with love and loss and social change, be they bored housewives or Bob Dylan. He’s unafraid of delivering such small-scale stories with style, boldly wearing influences such as Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. His biggest triumphs include two films with radically different tones but equally nuanced understandings of the mannerisms and aesthetics of their time periods: Carol, a lesbian romance set in the staid ’50s, and Velvet Goldmine, a brassy depiction of the ’70s glam-rock scene. May December contains all of Haynes’s characteristic multitudes; at moments, Elizabeth’s nosiness can be laugh-out-loud funny, but as she prods at Gracie and Joe, she exposes more of the trauma underlying their partnership.
“[You never] have moral stability while watching the film,” Haynes told me. “Neither female character is ever redeemed; there’s never a place of rest through the whole film. That’s just so invigorating and fun.” Though he usually writes his movies, Portman’s enthusiasm about Burch’s script was enough to intrigue him. From there, Haynes passed it along to Moore, his most frequent collaborator. May December is their fifth film together and her third time playing a housewife for him, though the circumstances are always wildly different. His 1995 breakout film, Safe, starred Moore as a seemingly happy woman who is besieged by mysterious illnesses; eventually attributing them to the unseen toxins of modern life, she retreats from society altogether. In 2002’s Far From Heaven, Moore played a ’50s homemaker named Cathy Whitaker roiled by the discovery that her husband is gay.
Gracie is also trapped in a suburban milieu, but she’s resistant to any kind of examination or transformation, instead wrapping herself in layers of self-deception about her initial grooming of Joe and the normalcy of their subsequent relationship. They’re “in that kind of state of perpetual denial about what they came out of, but also just basically raising kids and doing what families do,” Haynes said.
Still, Gracie and Joe are always performing for whoever’s around them, giving an extra charge to the few scenes where the two are actually alone. “A lot of the film is about being public and being exposed … so the moments of careful and selective intimacy between [Gracie and Joe] are really important. But they also need to be just enough,” Haynes said. As May December begins, Gracie (who speaks with a cloying, singsongy voice) is hopeful that Elizabeth’s film will reframe the public narrative about her and Joe. But Elizabeth is uninterested in making a puff piece, instead professing a desire to get at the truth of the partnership by interviewing the people around Gracie (her ex-husband, her children with him, her lawyer) and eventually getting closer to Joe, whose handsomeness belies a withdrawn and somewhat stunted emotional life.
Read: May December exposes the act of self-deception
Melton is the film’s most surprising component, given that he’s best known for the CW teen dramedy Riverdale. “When I first saw the headshot of Charles … me and Laura [Rosenthal, the film’s casting director] were like, I don’t know,” Haynes said. “He’s like a model; it just didn’t seem like he’d fit into this world.” But Melton’s subsequent audition excavated something that no other actor’s had. “It was different from anybody else’s—it was more fragile, more pent-up, more preverbal than anybody. All of a sudden, I felt like I was learning about who this character was,” Haynes said of Melton’s tape. “You have to let the person fill in things for you and sometimes challenge preset ideas that you have already formed in your head of who this character might be.” Melton puts Joe’s vulnerabilities right at the surface, embracing the dichotomy of a grown man who has three children yet often, especially in his interactions with both women, still comes across as a teenager.
To Elizabeth, Joe and Gracie are puzzles to be unlocked rather than regular people. She approaches her time with them as a hunt for truth, and harbors the pretentious belief that only an actor like her can understand the human condition. But whether she actually has much talent is unclear; she’s more of a People’s Choice Award winner than an Oscar contender. She’s “full of all the jargon and presumptions of truth-telling … this special sort of ambition that’s driving this particular role and job for this actress who isn’t getting the kind of serious critical attention she might want,” Haynes said. For an actor like Portman, an Oscar winner who is fond of big, bold, accent-heavy work (see Jackie and Vox Lux), slipping into self-parody would be easy.
Haynes said that Portman embraced that perception. “She was not interested at all in distinguishing projections people might make onto the character and onto Natalie Portman as an actor,” he said, noting that Elizabeth is “styled in a way that is very similar to [Portman’s] own aesthetic,” sporting her hair and general fashion sense. When thinking about how to present the movie to audiences, Haynes basically handed over the frame to his actors, shooting in long, unbroken takes—and, in one crucial scene, letting Portman stare down the camera as Elizabeth reads an old love letter that Gracie wrote to Joe, in open defiance of the fourth wall.
“It was hard to not think of Persona when I first read” the monologue, Haynes said, referring to Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film, also about an actor forming a strange and powerful bond with another woman. He also thought of another Bergman movie, Winter Light, in which a character reads from a love letter she wrote to someone who doesn’t share the same feelings: “It’s just so simple, which is often [Bergman’s] magic. And it’s the performance—the dead, fierce centrality of the frame, and her looking at the lens.”
That May December, with its laugh lines about hot dogs and its ripped-from-the-headlines narrative, can be mentioned in the same sentence as Bergman is what makes Haynes such a special filmmaker. In the hands of someone else, the film might have leaned into the tabloid trashiness, or emphasized the treacly Lifetime-movie melodrama. But although Haynes doesn’t shy away from humor or big emotions, he lets his characters be more than cartoons. To him, May December should be one of those “movies that make you feel confused and uncertain about what you think, and you want to see them again, and you want to talk about them with your friends and bring your parents,” Haynes said to me, with a grin. “That’s what made me love movies. That’s what all great movies are.”
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