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Much of Todd Haynes\u2019s sly, unnerving \u201cMay December\u201d takes place in and around a picture-perfect home, that favorite movieland setting for American dreams turned nightmares. This one comes wrapped in a dappled, hazy light that blunts hard lines and brightens every face, so much so that characters sometimes look lit from within. Even the evening has an inviting velvetiness, as if all of life\u2019s shadows have been banished. In characteristic Haynes fashion, though, nothing is as it first seems in this shimmering Gothic, including the light that becomes more like a queasy, suffocating miasma.<\/p>\n
\u201cMay December\u201d is the story of two women and their worlds of lies. They meet when a TV actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), visits Gracie (Julianne Moore), the inspiration for her next role. Gracie lives in a large waterfront house in Savannah with her husband, Joe (Charles Melton), their teenage twins and two Irish setters. They have another kid in college, jobs they seem to enjoy and a complicated history that\u2019s summed up by the box Elizabeth finds at their front door, and which Gracie opens with a shrug of familiarity. It\u2019s feces, she explains coolly, and this isn\u2019t the first such package.<\/p>\n
That box is a blunt metaphor for the ugliness at the core of \u201cMay December\u201d \u2014 years ago, Gracie became tabloid fodder after she was caught having sex with Joe when he was in seventh grade \u2014 a setup that Haynes brilliantly complicates with his three knockout leads, great narrative dexterity and shocks of destabilizing humor that ease you into the story. The first time I watched the movie, I almost clapped my hand over my mouth during one absurd moment, unsure if I was supposed to be laughing this hard. Of course I was: Haynes is having fun, at least for a while, partly to play with our expectations about where the movie is headed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
A progenitor of the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s, Haynes likes to dig into that space between the world that exists (or we believe exists) and the world of appearances. He\u2019s a virtuoso of paradoxes. That partly explains why he\u2019s drawn to the woman\u2019s film, with its focus on ordinary life, its domestic spaces, moral quandaries, political dimensions and tears. These films evoke what the critic Molly Haskell once described as \u201cwet, wasted afternoons\u201d and reveal what lies \u201cbeneath the sunny-side-up philosophy congealed in the happy ending.\u201d She might as well have been talking about this movie.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Written by Samy Burch \u2014 it\u2019s her first produced screenplay \u2014 \u201cMay December\u201d is a woman\u2019s picture in a distinctly Haynesian key. As he has in some of his earlier films (\u201cFar From Heaven,\u201d \u201cCarol\u201d), Haynes at once embraces and toys with genre conventions. He uses beautiful images (and people), bursts of lush music, pointed metaphors and floods of feeling to provide the familiar pleasures of a well-told, absorbing narrative film, even as he picks it apart at the seams. This can create an uneasy dissonance, and there are instances when it seems as if you\u2019re watching two overlaid movies: the original and its critique, a doubling that works nicely in \u201cMay December,\u201d which soon becomes a labyrinthine hall of mirrors.<\/p>\n
Gracie\u2019s character is loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau<\/a>, a teacher who in 1997 was arrested for having sex with one of her sixth-grade students, abuse that started when he was 12. She pleaded guilty to child rape and eventually served time in prison, where she gave birth to their first two children. (They later married.) The case generated a predictable tsunami of grotesque media slavering and found putatively serious journalists referring (and continuing to refer) to the sexual assault as a \u201ctryst<\/a>\u201d and \u201cforbidden love<\/a>,\u201d language that prettied up the crime as a passionate romance.<\/p>\n Gracie rationalizes her relationship with Joe on her own terms, which emerge as Elizabeth gathers intel. As Elizabeth plays detective \u2014 she scans old tabloids, interviews family and friends \u2014 she helpfully establishes the back story. Gracie isn\u2019t a teacher, and she and Joe met in a pet store, a seemingly incidental detail that takes on poignantly metaphoric resonance as the story unfolds. At one point, Elizabeth also accompanies Gracie and her daughter Mary (Elizabeth Yu) on a shopping trip. When the girl tries on a sleeveless dress, Gracie tells Mary she\u2019s \u201cbrave\u201d for baring her arms and not caring about \u201cunrealistic beauty standards.\u201d Mary looks crushed, Gracie oblivious and Elizabeth a bit stunned but oh-so fascinated.<\/p>\n At this stage in her process, Elizabeth has begun to imitate Gracie\u2019s gestures and expressions, a turn that Haynes expresses in the tricky shot that opens the shopping scene. As Mary tries on dresses, the women sit side-by-side facing the camera, two mirrors flanking them like drawn curtains. Because of the angles of the mirror, Elizabeth looks as if she\u2019s seated between Gracie and Gracie\u2019s reflection. It takes a beat to read the image and figure out why there are two Gracies, although as Elizabeth slips into character, suddenly there are three.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Moore and Portman\u2019s synced performances give the movie much of its weird comedy. Elizabeth guides you into the story, and you\u2019re tagging along when she pulls up to her Savannah digs and later to Gracie and Joe\u2019s home. Portman gives Elizabeth the studied agreeability of someone who has to work to present a friendly front, an effort that will be familiar to anyone who\u2019s ever interviewed a bored film star. Elizabeth is quick to smile, but Portman shows you the character\u2019s brittle affect, so that you see the flickers of hesitation in her eyes and twitches around her mouth. Mostly, you see that Elizabeth isn\u2019t a very good actress. (Presumably that\u2019s why when she tries out Gracie\u2019s lisping voice, she evokes Madeline Kahn<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Gracie doesn\u2019t need to put up a false front because her existence is nothing but a fully committed, melodramatically rich performance that Moore supplely delivers with alternating eerie calm and impressive histrionic mewling and caterwauling. Gracie has embraced her roles as a loving wife and doting mother, and seems to be living in a profound state of denial about what these roles have cost her husband and children, a lack of understanding (and remorse) that establishes the story\u2019s inaugural moral crisis. It\u2019s not at all clear, at first, if Gracie is lying to herself, blissfully self-unaware or just another garden-variety sociopath playing at the American dream, uncertainty that gives the story a frisson of mystery.<\/p>\n Gracie and Elizabeth dominate the first half of \u201cMay December.\u201d Then, almost imperceptibly, the focus shifts to Joe, and the story grows ever more serious, heavy and very, very sad. Moore and Portman are tremendous, but it\u2019s Melton\u2019s anguished performance that gives the movie its slow-building emotional power. A stunted man-child with a hulking, ponderous body, Joe too has multiple roles as a father and husband, an object of desire and exoticized other. Yet none fit as persuasively, and he\u2019s most at ease in the scenes of him with the Monarch butterflies he raises in little cages. It\u2019s a sweet pastime and a potentially blunt metaphor, one that Haynes handles with enormous, moving delicacy, never more so than when these beautiful creatures emerge from their chrysalises and Joe tenderly watches them take flight.<\/p>\n May December<\/strong>
Rated R for references to the sexual abuse of minors and some adult nudity. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Watch on Netflix.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n