May December
Todd Haynes probes at the boundaries between truth and hypocrisy.
Twenty-odd years after their relationship became a nationwide tabloid scandal, Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton) welcome actor Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) into their home. Gracie and Joe’s relationship—which is loosely based on the real-life case of Mary Kay Letourneau—began when she was thirty-six and he was in the seventh grade. The two insist that there is nothing wrong with their relationship; they’ve been married for well over a decade now, and they’re about to send their two youngest children off to college. But Elizabeth’s visit, part of her research for playing Gracie in an upcoming movie, cracks the veneer. Haynes’s film then peels that veneer wide open, making May December an exploration of breathless hypocrisy.
May December approaches the ugliness of Gracie and Joe’s story from the respectable remove of several decades and with the framing device of Elizabeth’s research. From the outside, the fallout of their relationship seems to have subsided. We never see her exploit him as a minor. We only know that it happened from newspaper clippings and the hushed-tone discussions Elizabeth has with the couple’s extended family. The two seem to have reintegrated into their community; at the very least, they can conduct what looks like a relatively normal life. He raises butterflies, and she bakes cakes. Elizabeth’s probing interviews are part of a quest for more context and understanding, but her conversations with those who were involved only serve to stir up waters that everyone else would prefer to leave undisturbed. The cognitive dissonance of living in a community with Gracie and Joe is enough; having to talk about it openly puts everyone on edge. Gracie and Joe and others in their circle keep asking Elizabeth to tell the truth with her portrayal and to be kind while she’s at it. They’re all too close to the situation to understand what they’re actually asking Elizabeth to do.
Haynes refuses to treat the situation with the same gravity that everyone in the story does. Rather than taking anyone involved at face value, he layers on a tone of tragicomic melodrama, underlined by severe, heavy piano scoring and the heavy-handed zooms of exploitative made-for-Lifetime TV movies. (In a hilarious early moment, Haynes deploys one such zoom in a way that telegraphs impending doom, only for the subject of the shot to disappointedly declare that they don’t have enough food for their Memorial Day cookout.) The tone undercuts the sensitivity with which Haynes tells the story, as though he’s winking at the audience: “I know you’re both curious and repelled,” he seems to say, and he teeters between sordid fascination and sober tragedy. For the most part, he’s successful. May December is funny and appalling at the same time, somehow managing to balance the horror of what Gracie has done—and what she won’t apologize for—with a sense of incredulity about Elizabeth’s choice to try to dignify Gracie’s story, and at everyone else around Gracie and Joe for just going along with it.
Haynes tells the story as both a grocery-store tabloid and a critical examination of the nature of such a tabloid. He finds surprising points of view with the camera, especially in the mundanity of the characters’ goings-on. When Elizabeth fields questions from a high-school drama class, the teenagers fade into the black background, until Elizabeth and her voice are the only things in the room when she talks about herself and her work. (Like Gracie, she’s too close to what she does; she is self-aware enough to know whenever she crosses some societal boundary but not conscientious enough to understand when that boundary crossing hurts anyone other than herself.) In contrast, Joe is nearly a non-entity in his own story. When one of the butterflies he’s been raising in the living room emerges from its chrysalis, he walks through the porch door and sets it free. Haynes films Joe’s shadow bouncing off the glass of the sliding door, and Joe’s shadow on the glass reveals the empty kitchen inside, almost in a sort of double-exposure, a canister of flour on the counter superimposed where his heart would be. He’s an empty shell of a man, and he doesn’t even know it.
Elizabeth, for her part, wants to empty herself out so she can portray Gracie. Her technique seems to be part Method, part Persona. When she first arrives at Gracie’s house, Elizabeth is the sunglasses-wearing, aloof movie star that Gracie expects her to be. Over the course of the runtime, Elizabeth physically disappears into her role: her bangs vanish, she purses her lips, she affects Gracie’s lisp. This transformation is conscious and studied, and we watch as Elizabeth watches herself in the mirror alongside Gracie, making tiny artificial adjustments to imitate the real person next to her. For Elizabeth, Gracie is a character to be played, but Gracie has to actually live the rest of her life.
From the audience’s perspective, the camera so often is the mirror. Whenever a mirror appears on screen, it seems to warp reality until it’s impossible to tell what is reflection and what is original. This camerawork complicates the story, transforming what could have been a simple cause-and-effect morality tale into something stranger and stickier. Gracie is culpable for her actions, but so is Elizabeth, and tracing the tangle of wrongdoing back to its source is more complicated than one might think. There is no clean ending; everyone is at fault in some way, however small. Gracie’s community likes her but hasn’t forgiven her for what she’s done. Elizabeth wants to earn respect as a serious actress, and she feels she needs to do so by playing a culpable character in a sordid story. She mines Gracie’s story so thoroughly that the boundaries between Elizabeth and Gracie are nearly obliterated. As for me, I respect May December; its tightrope walk is impressive. But I don’t feel like I have to like it. —Sarah Welch-Larson
★★★☆
May December is in limited theatrical release this weekend. It hits Netflix on December 1.
We’re taking Thanksgiving week off, but we’ll be back the following week.