May December opens in select theaters November 17, and streams on Netflix December 1. This review is based on a screening at the 2023 New York Film Festival.
Few director-actor pairings are as perfect as Todd Haynes and Julianne Moore. May December marks their fourth collaboration since 1995 (after Safe, Far From Heaven and Wonderstruck), and it borders on tragic that they haven’t worked together dozens of other times. Moore is tuned in to Haynes’ wavelength of domestic melodrama, and in their latest collaboration, her particular brand of campy performance becomes the epicenter of a sensuous, raw, funny, and profoundly unsettling story of a controversial tabloid figure and the TV star (Natalie Portman) shadowing her ahead of an upcoming biopic.
Co-written by Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik, May December is a film with captivating performances all around, centered on the idea of finding truth in unusual (even disturbing) circumstances, where characters concealing their genuine selves is the default modus operandi. The warmth of its Savannah, Georgia setting lures us into a false sense of comfort, as Elizabeth Berry (Portman) meets Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Moore) for the first time, in a personable if standoffish exchange at one of Gracie’s intimate socialite gatherings. It’s an awkward scenario, of course, meeting the woman set to play you in a movie. However, as the full picture emerges – the scope of Elizabeth’s role, and the real story it’s telling – “awkward” becomes a euphemism at best.
Gracie, a woman in her 50s, met her 30-something husband Joe (Charles Melton) back when she was in her 30s, but he was only 13 – the film’s title is an old term for an age-gap romance, contrasting the spring of youth with the winter of old age. They’re well settled now, with three children – a daughter in college, and fraternal twins (a son and a daughter) about to graduate high school – but the stain of Gracie’s actions, and her subsequent stint in prison for statutory rape, has followed them ever since. (The contours of this story will be familiar to anyone who followed the case of Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau in the 1990s.) As Elizabeth goes on a fact-finding mission, interviewing friends, neighbors and family members, a wider picture of events emerges. Yet its authenticity remains shrouded in a fog of uncertainty as thick as the humid Savannah air, owing to how closely guarded Gracie is about every interaction with Elizabeth, even as she grants the Hollywood starlet unfettered access to her daily life.
The film’s doorway to the past is limited to conversations, magazine clippings, and Elizabeth’s field trips to familiar locations (like the locally notorious pet store where Gracie and Joe were caught). Foregoing flashbacks, Haynes forces the very idea of “truth” to become mutable and malleable. The facts are never in dispute – the way they might’ve been had May December taken the form of a courtroom drama – but by filtering Gracie and Joe’s saga through the lenses of cinema and performance, it becomes emotionally fluid in every scene.
Composer Marcelo Zarvos imbues the story with a TV soap opera sensibility, with repetitive, blaring piano notes that accompany scene transitions and slow zooms in and out of information in between verbose exchanges. May December is a film of enveloping textures, thanks in large part to cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, whose golden-hour shots through swaying trees and canopies of leaves turn the perpetual sunset into an unwavering spotlight. It’s a reminder of the success in store for Elizabeth should she nail this potentially Oscar-worthy role and a reflection of the notoriety from which Gracie constantly tries to hide.
When Portman and Moore are on screen together, the result is magic, with a not-so-subtle visual twinning of their characters through Haynes’ framing – where the stars often share space with mirrors and screens – and through Portman’s increasingly noticeable (and noticeably caricatured) imitations of Moore’s voice and body language. But what Elizabeth doesn’t see is the messy and complicated nature of “the truth” she’s searching for when it emerges behind closed doors, through Gracie’s hair-trigger temper and emotional fragility. It’s born from a looming sense of… something. Let’s call it guilt, or regret, or fear; it has no name because of how deeply Gracie buries it, and how Haynes treats it as an emotional mystery, whose raucous manifestations are far more cinematically interesting to him than the mechanics of its psychology.
The film’s secret weapon is Melton’s performance as Joe, a man trapped between youth and middle age, whose casual dadcore clothing is an awkward fit. He has his hobbies, like nurturing caterpillars – once they’re fully grown and reborn into monarch butterflies, he frees them as if in an act of wish fulfillment – but he continues to live in Gracie’s domineering shadow, despite a veneer of domestic normalcy.
Haynes’ keen focus on how characters see themselves, versus how they want to be perceived, creates a livewire tension that often tips over into hilarity, especially when mere words and observations from other characters are enough to puncture the insular bubbles they create to protect their egos. It’s through Joe’s relationship to Gracie, and the distasteful nature of their backstory, that the film finds both its most gauche and tender moments, balancing the jet-black humor of arrested development, and of climbers and Hollywood leeches turning trauma into entertainment, with the vulnerability of a past long buried and denied. Those hidden wounds are thoroughly exacerbated by Elizabeth’s inquiries and her constant presence in Joe and Gracie’s lives. It's a stunning tonal tightrope act from all involved, and one of the most uncomfortably entertaining films this year.
