‘May December’ Movie Review: Todd Haynes’ Melodrama Masters Tricky Tone And Complex Performances
Photo from Netflix
From Jeremy Kibler
By studying a Mary Kay Letourneau-type scandal through the prism of a method actor’s process, filmmaker Todd Haynes (Carol) enters morally complex and thematically daring territory with May December. In writer Samy Burch’s script, a scandalous relationship and subsequent marriage, which became tabloid fodder, is the basis for an upcoming indie film project, and a hungry actress needs to do the work. Skirting the line between an emotionally true drama and a big, lurid melodrama, Haynes’ film is psychologically insightful and yet still very entertaining with understated, skillfully calibrated performances.
In this film’s reality, Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) was married with children and 36 years old when she had an affair with 13-year-old seventh grader Joe (played as an adult by Charles Melton). After being convicted of rape and serving her sentence, Gracie and Joe now have a happy life with three teenage children in Savannah, Georgia (with the exception of hate mail in the form of human shit in a box). Things get shaken up when TV actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) arrives at the couple’s barbecue, ready to study and get to know the real person behind the role she’ll be playing. It’s a planned arrangement, of course, but Gracie and Joe are busy gearing up for their twin son and daughter’s high school graduation and empty nest syndrome. As Elizabeth hangs around the family and meets up to chat with as many people that know Gracie, she hopes to give the most honest portrayal and maybe even understand Gracie.
There’s a trickiness to all three lead performances, and none of them strike a false note. Julianne Moore, speaking with a slight lisp, is obviously a master of her craft (and now making this her sixth collaboration with Haynes). In playing Gracie, she alternates between a motherly homemaker and a needy girl. Like Elizabeth says in taking on any role (“I wanted to find a character that’s difficult to, on the surface, understand”), Gracie is very hard to pin down. Natalie Portman is every bit Moore’s equal as Elizabeth, exquisite in how she listens and takes in everything there is to know about Gracie (sometimes with a notepad in hand). Actors who take on roles based on real-life people surely have a responsibility beyond copying voice inflection and mannerisms, and to Elizabeth, it’s like investigative journalism with a wily touch of manipulation. In one of the film’s more overtly funny scenes, Elizabeth is a class guest in Gracie and Joe’s daughter’s school; a class clown asks the actress about acting out sex scenes, and Elizabeth lives for the question: “Am I pretending I’m experiencing pleasure, or am I pretending I’m not experiencing pleasure?”
The biggest surprise here is Charles Melton (Riverdale), who’s soulful and quietly outstanding as Joe, a man who has grown up faster than many his age. He has three children with Gracie but is almost more like an older brother to them, as if he hasn’t yet confronted the truth. Joe does have a very singular hobby, where he breeds butterflies in the family room before setting them free (not unlike Ben Affleck’s weird snail collection in Adrian Lyne’s Deep Water); while it is a minor character detail, it’s perhaps too on the nose as metaphors go. Otherwise, the dynamic between Elizabeth and Gracie, Gracie and Joe, and Joe and Elizabeth is strange and fascinating, and Haynes is sure to never judge any of them.
On a technical level, Haynes makes sure every department is top-notch, from Christopher Blauvelt’s soft and gauzy cinematography, to April Napier’s costume design, to Marcelo Zarvos’ simply dramatic piano score. Adapted from Michel Legrand’s score in the film The Go-Between, the menacing notes of the score become an unexpectedly funny motif right out of a juicy melodrama, from Elizabeth recreating Gracie and a then-teenage Joe’s sexual encounter in the same pet store room, to Gracie just opening the fridge to realize, “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs.”
Exploring a May-December relationship and all of its layers under the microscope with the added layer of an actor’s challenge, May December is provocative, thorny, and self-reflexive. It leaves more to think about than the tawdry, ‘90s-style erotic thriller this could have been.
Rating: 4/5
May December hits select theaters on November 17, 2023 and will stream on Netflix on December 1, 2023.
