Film Review: "May December"
Todd Haynes' newest melodrama forces the viewer to confront their own complicity in tabloid excess.
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I first fell in love with the cinematic style of Todd Haynes during graduate school, when I watched Far from Heaven as part of a course on Hollywood melodrama. I was smitten with his meticulous attention to the craft of movie-making, and I now make a point of seeing his films as they come out (Carol remains one of his best works, in my humble opinion). He has once again outdone himself in May December, which focuses on Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), as she sets out to study the infamous Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), who was sentenced to prison for having sex with underrage Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), to whom she is now married. As the film goes on, the line between fact and fiction, fuzzy at best, becomes ever more uncertain.
It’s no secret that Julianne Moore seems to be Haynes’ particular muse, and Moore has always excelled at playing women who are more than a little lost in the world around them, and Gracie fits neatly into the mold. Oh, she’s manipulative, to be sure–she’s prone to using tears to wrap Joe around her fingers and using passive aggressive remarks to make her daughters feel the same sense of inferiority she clearly does–but one gets the sense that much of this is a defense mechanism. Whether or not it is true that she was sexually assaulted by her brothers, as her disturbed son Georgie (a delightfully unhinged Cory Michael Smith) claims, it’s clear that Gracie finds it almost impossible to figure out her own place in the world or how to act in a morally conscionable way. Right up to the end she insists up to the end that she is in control of her own story.
It has to be said, though, that Natalie Portman gives as good as she gets in this film. At first her young actress seems to be just what she says she is: someone researching a role, and for about the first third of the film she seems more than a little like an ingenue, someone both befuddled yet captivated by the strange life Gracie and Joe have built. Beneath that placid surface, though, there is something far darker, and as the film goes on Elizabeth starts to take on more and more of the attributes of her subject: changing her hair, dressing in the same sort of simple clothes, even affecting Gracie’s delicate lisp. Though she says she wants to get to the truth of who Gracie is, one gets the sense that there is something more at work here and that, somewhere along the line, the line between actor and subject has irretrievably blurred.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the moment when Elizabeth delivers a talk on acting to a group of high school students, in which she details why it is that she loves taking on morally gray characters like Gracie. As she speaks, her tone and her words become ever more suggestive, and it’s obvious from Gracie’s daughter Mary’s response that she at least feels a bit of discomfort at hearing this woman clearly allude to her mother’s earlier indiscretions with her father. For Elizabeth, however, it’s clear that there’s something transportive, ecstatic even, about this transgression.
It’s not until Elizabeth seduces Joe, however, that her true inner darkness makes itself truly manifest. In addition to being incredibly manipulative–and thus replicating the very dynamic that brought Gracie and Joe together in the first place–their encounter is clearly emotionally disorienting for Joe, who thought Elizabeth actually cared about him and wanted to get to know him. Elizabeth’s motivations in initiating this encounter remain opaque, but I do know that her statement that “This is what grown-ups do” is a line that will forever be seared into my brain, precisely because of Portman’s unnerving delivery. It’s Gracie-by-way-of Elizabeth. Whether or not Elizabeth has only become this way because of her immersion in Gracie’s mindset or for some other sinister motivation the end result is the same. Joe has once again been used for someone else’s fulfillment.
While Moore and Portman are unsurprisingly heavy-hitting in their performances, Charles Melton is also a revelation as Joe Yoo. Even though he is the father of several children, he still seems like little more than a child himself in some key ways, prone to a certain aimlessness. He spends most of his time tending to his monarch butterflies and running errands for Gracie (as well as managing her outbursts and emotional collapses, which can occur over something as simple as a canceled bakery order). Yet he is also a tender and loving father, and he seems to be much more concerned about his children’s emotional well-being than their mother, and Melton deserves all the accolades for the wounded soulfulness he brings to the role.
It’s no secret that Haynes is a richly formalist filmmaker, someone who pays attention to every detail of the moving image, and he uses that perfectionism to great effect here. In one of the film’s most genuinely hilarious moments, Gracie looks into the refrigerator as the score swells ominously and portentously, only for her to declaim that she thinks they may not have enough hot dogs for the cookout she is hosting.The juxtaposition of such a banal statement with sonic excess is peak melodrama, and it’s a motif which recurs throughout the film, constantly discomfiting us even as it makes us laugh at the absurdity of it all. This is a film, it seems, that wants you to sit with the discomfort of bearing witness to this strange little melodramatic tableau, to muse, perhaps, on the ugly tabloid culture of the 1990s that made Mary Kay Letourneau a household name and far more famous than she deserved to be.
In May December there are no easy answers. Just as the score doesn’t give us emotional cues on which we can reliably tether our interpretation of what we’re seeing unfold before us, so the film plays coy with the truth. There are numerous instances of the characters gazing into mirrors, their identities turned back on them and on us. In one particularly notable instance, Gracie and Elizabeth gaze together into a mirror while the latter tries to recapture Gracie’s particular makeup look. It’s a moment filled with sapphic overtones and camp beauty, and both Moore and Portman (and Haynes) know exactly what they’re doing. In the world of May December everything–desire, accountability, the past, even identity itself–are as insubstantial and false as a reflection and we, the audience, can only laugh nervously at our own complicity.