Todd Haynes’s May December is a beautiful, terrible nesting doll of a film with a uniquely twisted core.
In Todd Haynes’s new film, May December, an actor named Elizabeth (played by Natalie Portman) arrives in Savannah, Georgia, for a very particular assignment. She intends to study the life of Gracie (Julianne Moore), a woman who became a tabloid fixture in the ’90s after she, at 36 years old and with a family of her own, was caught having sex with a then-13-year-old boy named Joe. Elizabeth is set to play Gracie in a movie, and she’s struck by Gracie’s blithe demeanor when they meet. More than two decades after the scandal broke, Gracie has built a seemingly idyllic life with Joe (Charles Melton): They’re married, with three children—including one she had while serving her prison sentence—and they live in a beautiful waterfront home. Gracie insists on moving past her sordid history, and Elizabeth, awed by her subject after their first encounter, describes the woman as the embodiment of “radical defiance.”
That’s one way to put it. Another—and perhaps more accurate—way to describe Gracie’s outlook would be to call it profound self-deception. Gracie has painted her relationship with Joe as a star-crossed love story so many times that she believes she did nothing wrong. And as the film unspools, Elizabeth begins to copy Gracie and justify her own boundary-crossing actions and omnipresence in the couple’s life as necessary research for her role. The women become twin manipulators, exhuming suppressed emotions around Gracie and Joe’s marriage while simultaneously burying deeper truths.
May December is about liars, in other words—and it is in and of itself deliciously deceptive. Haynes has made a beautiful, terrible nesting doll of a film with a uniquely twisted core. Beneath the droll portrait of an actor’s obsession with her muse is an unsettling tale of what happens when people refuse to tell the truth: the invisible damage wrought, the wounds that never heal. As a result, the movie is both a condemnation of the impulse to keep such tawdry stories alive—whether as incessant tabloid fodder in the ’90s or as true-crime projects today—and a reminder of why we can’t get enough of them in the first place. As a viewer, your sympathies shift from one character to the next until you must contend with how you, too, have become captivated by their melodrama. And how can you not, when the people involved are so haunted, their situation so absurd, so messy, so wrong?
This tension is Haynes’s sweet spot as a director. Loosely based on the real-life couple Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau, May December follows some of Haynes’s favorite kinds of characters: those who engage in sexual and cultural transgressions; who shift among identities; who weaponize and fall victim to their own beauty, their own apparently perfect lifestyles. Haynes is known for being a stylish storyteller, but here he juggles the narrative’s varying tones—mischievous, uneasy, and sensitive in equal measure—with restrained camerawork, emphasizing the distance created by the screenwriter Samy Burch’s script. Set 23 years after Gracie first groomed Joe, the story is free to explore the emotional aftermath of their relationship—to question not just what happened but also who these people have become.
Gracie, for her part, has calcified into a mask of a human being—a woman who performs warmth but never exudes it fully—and Moore, Haynes’s frequent collaborator, conveys both Gracie’s hardened resistance to judgment and her desperation for control. Dressed in ruffled baby-doll outfits and speaking with a lisp, Gracie passive-aggressively influences her children’s decision-making, commands Joe to do her bidding, and throws tear-streaked tantrums when she senses any stress that could lead to her reckoning with her past. Elizabeth, meanwhile, sees Gracie as a character to be dissected and diagrammed; she can barely contain her glee at getting total access to Gracie, her family, and anyone who wants to share their opinions on what she did.
Portman is excellent, initially playing Elizabeth as a sympathetic audience surrogate before steadily transforming her into a parasite who believes that her exploitative efforts are justified in the pursuit of making capital-A Art. Over the course of their time together, Elizabeth and Gracie engage in an emotional tug-of-war, and Haynes frequently frames them through mirrors and layers their faces together à la Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. The shots suggest that both enjoy the scrutiny to some extent—Elizabeth as a TV star hoping to be taken more seriously, and Gracie because this is her chance to cement a cleaner, softer narrative about herself to the public. Neither ever sees the other clearly, of course. That’s part of the fun of May December.
The film’s soul, though, belongs to Melton’s Joe. The actor, best known thus far for playing a hotheaded jock on the CW’s Riverdale, brings an astonishing tenderness to the part. Joe walks and talks as if he’s uncertain he’s doing things right—like a boy still getting used to having his own thoughts, let alone the freedom to share them. It’s a wrenching performance; Joe has long since committed to his role as Gracie’s partner, but his interrupted coming-of-age means that he has no idea if that role is what he truly wants. He is the same age as Elizabeth but never sounds comfortable talking with her. He’s the father of three, but it’s unclear if he’s actually parenting. “I don’t know if we’re connecting or if I’m creating a bad memory for you,” he tells his son one afternoon after accidentally getting too high while smoking weed together—a darkly funny scenario, but a confession that, uttered by Melton, expresses Joe’s loneliness and dawning realization that his situation is far from normal, and perhaps even tragic.
Haynes—aided by a discordant score from Marcelo Zarvos, who adapted Michel Legrand’s work from the 1971 film The Go-Between—trains the camera on the details that show the ripple effects of Gracie’s abuse. He zooms in on a bowl of cigarette butts that Joe’s father, distressed after another strained visit from Joe, has chain-smoked on his balcony. He holds a shot of Joe watching television with a blank stare until Gracie reminds him to do a chore. He lets the silence linger after Gracie runs into her grandchildren and exchanges fake pleasantries with her former family. And the Savannah of May December feels surreal, evoking the artificial reality that Gracie has constructed, in which she is blameless. The sunlight is blinding; the shadowy house in which Gracie and Joe live is suffocating. These characters and their loved ones are frozen in time, the film implies, to be permanently X-rayed by the people around them. They’re a source of endless fascination, criticized and pitied and used as a cautionary tale.
Through it all, Haynes deploys one image again and again: that of a caterpillar metamorphosing into a monarch butterfly. Joe raises the endangered species, transferring eggs into containers he maintains every day until the butterflies are ready to be released. The symbolism is a tad on the nose—a maturation cycle cared for by a man who could not mature—but it’s appropriate for a film that also beautifully transforms. May December begins grotesquely, with Elizabeth collecting and reenacting the most unsavory details of Gracie and Joe’s affair, down to where they were discovered having sex. It ends delicately, as a portrait of fragile, shattered human beings and the mundane entertainment they inspire. This, too, has become a cycle, May December suggests. Disturbing reality will always give way to judgment, to adaptation, and we will gaze open-mouthed at the destruction until we move on to whatever troubling story comes next.
A Movie About Our Endless Obsession With Tabloid Scandals
5
0
01.12.2023
Todd Haynes’s May December is a beautiful, terrible nesting doll of a film with a uniquely twisted core.
In Todd Haynes’s new film, May December, an actor named Elizabeth (played by Natalie Portman) arrives in Savannah, Georgia, for a very particular assignment. She intends to study the life of Gracie (Julianne Moore), a woman who became a tabloid fixture in the ’90s after she, at 36 years old and with a family of her own, was caught having sex with a then-13-year-old boy named Joe. Elizabeth is set to play Gracie in a movie, and she’s struck by Gracie’s blithe demeanor when they meet. More than two decades after the scandal broke, Gracie has built a seemingly idyllic life with Joe (Charles Melton): They’re married, with three children—including one she had while serving her prison sentence—and they live in a beautiful waterfront home. Gracie insists on moving past her sordid history, and Elizabeth, awed by her subject after their first encounter, describes the woman as the embodiment of “radical defiance.”
That’s one way to put it. Another—and perhaps more accurate—way to describe Gracie’s outlook would be to call it profound self-deception. Gracie has painted her relationship with Joe as a star-crossed love story so many times that she believes she did nothing wrong. And as the film unspools, Elizabeth begins to copy Gracie and justify her own boundary-crossing actions and omnipresence in the couple’s life as necessary research for her role. The women become twin manipulators, exhuming suppressed emotions around Gracie and Joe’s marriage while simultaneously burying deeper truths.
May December is about liars, in other words—and it is in and of itself deliciously deceptive. Haynes has made a beautiful, terrible nesting doll of a film with a uniquely twisted core. Beneath the droll portrait of an actor’s obsession with her muse is an unsettling tale of what happens when people refuse to tell the truth: the invisible damage........
© The Atlantic
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