Speaking to the press after a screening of May December, Todd Haynes identified himself primarily as an interpreter, both of cinematic forms of the past and of the pre-existing material from which his work is often adapted. That characterization certainly tracks through his filmography, from metacinematic homages (Poison, Far from Heaven) to kaleidoscopic renderings of pop idols (Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There) to his contemporary readings on midcentury fiction (Mildred Pierce, Carol).
Loosely based on the ’90s tabloid scandal of Mary Kay Letourneau, who at age 35 served a prison sentence for rape when her sexual relationship with a 12-year-old boy was made public, May December is perhaps the slipperiest entry in that interpretive project to date. Written by Samy Burch, the film examines real-world events through the lens of mass media with a wry humor that masks profoundly complex and painful undercurrents of emotion.
May December centers on two star turns that complement each other with a rare sensitivity: Julianne Moore as LeTourneau stand-in Gracie Atherton-Yoo, and Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Barry, a famous actress preparing to play Gracie in an independent film. Haynes’s film opens at Gracie’s well-appointed home in Savannah, Georgia, where her formerly salacious relationship with now-husband Joe (Charles Melton) has settled into a rhythm of relative, if largely deceptive, normalcy (the real Letourneau also eventually married her young lover, before dying in 2020). Although Joe is only 36, the couple have already sent their eldest daughter, Honor (Piper Curda), off to college, and are preparing to become empty nesters with the imminent graduation of their younger twins, Mary (Elizabeth Yu) and Charlie (Gabriel Chung).
The fissures in Gracie and Joe’s relationship don’t take long to reveal themselves to Elizabeth: When she arrives, the couple has just received a box of feces in the mail from an unknown objector to their relationship, and Joe remarks that such things don’t happen nearly as often as they used to. Gracie’s passive-aggressive domineering gives way to crying fits at the smallest of inconveniences, and Joe’s wounded, puppy-dog demeanor clearly masks deep reservoirs of regret. When Elizabeth asks him how it feels to send his kids off to college, all he can muster is a few words about how he couldn’t have understood what he was getting into as a teenage father.
The subject matter here is certainly a fraught one, especially at a time when so much of our collective imagination has been consumed by compounding and corrosive obsessions with both age-gap relationships (or outright pedophilia) and the cynical content-ification of real-life crimes and tragedies. The addition of Portman’s character, then, is the masterstroke that affords Haynes and Burch the distance to investigate and comment not only on the relationship between Gracie and Joe, but also on the hidden desires and neuroses that drive our own insatiable desire to turn real-life social pariahs into on-screen subjects.
As Elizabeth begins to assemble a more complete picture of the suffering caused by Gracie and Joe’s relationship—interviewing Gracie’s ex-husband, Tom (D.W. Moffett), and son, Georgie (Cory Michael Smith), from her first marriage, among others—May December assembles a puzzle around her as well. And the pieces include intimations of her own affair (with the upcoming film’s director) to the increasingly questionable motives of her research.
Throughout, Portman operates on an earnest, non-judgmental surface while constantly suggesting darker and more troubling shades just below that surface (a scene where she sits down with a high school theater class is among the most uncomfortably hilarious in Haynes’s career). Moore matches her at every step in her fifth collaboration with Haynes, sporting a childlike lisp that seems to emerge most strongly in moments of emotional distress. The most revelatory performance, though, comes from Melton, boiling down decades of impossibly conflicted emotions into clenched body language and aloof speech patterns that feel unmistakably like those of a man in permanently suspended adolescence.
Indeed, some of May December’s most potent ideas relate to the characters’ inability to move past that formative period. The film’s few missteps come from the moments when it attempts to draw a straight line from teenage trauma to adult anguish, but its excavations of personal history tend to dig up more questions than answers. Even the peripheral characters are invested with rich inner lives that seem to extend far beyond the sliver of the story that we’re witness to, an acknowledgement that the neatly packaged “true crime” stories that have so saturated our culture can’t possibly encapsulate the totality of the experiences of the people involved.
In that sense, May December’s ability to function as criticism while remaining deeply absorbing on its own terms is what makes it one of Haynes’s most singular acts of filmic interpretation. If Far from Heaven recreated Sirkian melodrama and Carol largely sidestepped it, then May December remixes and reimagines it until analysis and drama fuse into one.
One of May December’s biggest laughs comes from an early scene where a dramatic zoom into Moore’s profile and a swell of Marcelo Zarvos’s score (an adaptation and re-orchestration of Michel Legrand’s music for Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between) culminates in her blankly noting that “we’re not gonna have enough hot dogs” for their garden party. The integration of other media into the story—Portman’s real-life beauty product ads, a tawdry “movie of the week” about Gracie and Joe, and, finally, a snippet from the film in which Elizabeth portrays Gracie—also mark the film as being of a piece with Haynes’s postmodern project.
May December is Haynes’s entry in the “women swapping identities” subgenre (alongside Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Robert Altman’s 3 Women, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and so on), but it’s a fully original one, with its own perspective on the ever-shifting power dynamics at its core. And though quite stylistically reserved compared to the director’s other work, his subtle formal choices—like pushing Elizabeth to the edge of the frame in key scenes, or employing a multitude of reflective surfaces—are consistently psychologically revealing.
One of the personal details that Portman’s character offers is that her parents are academics, and that her mother wrote a respected paper on epistemic relativism—essentially, the idea that knowledge and truth are relative to the circumstances from which they arise. The relevance to Gracie and Joe, who publicly maintain the innocence and consensuality of their relationship despite widespread social rejection, is clear. What makes May December one of Haynes’s best works is its capacity to embody this destabilizing idea in truly disquieting ways, and without giving short shrift to the undeniable emotional devastation at its center.
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