Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore solve a true crime in May December

Todd Haynes is back, baby! After giving us a masterpiece Carol in 2015 Safe The director, whose films have typically been anything but safe, has spent the past few years churning out a disappointing 2017 double feature. miracle and 2019s Dark Waters. But he’s back on track with May Decembera creepy and hilarious postmodern provocation from the man who once used Barbie dolls to tell the story of Karen Carpenter’s life.

Reuniting Haynes with his greatest on-screen collaborator Julianne Moore while successfully bringing on board Natalie Portman is a reassessment of 1990s tabloid culture that the director puts under his microscope this round. And in Haynes’s hands, we get art out of it – complex, strange, tragic and surprising art. All of this makes Ryan Murphy a similar subject matter. American Crime Story Compared to them, the series looks like a dark puppet theater.

Portman plays Elizabeth Berry, a major Hollywood actress (she’s in movies, but everyone seems to know her best from her hit TV series (a fact she seems constantly embarrassed by)) who has a whole new role in the pipeline. She will play a real-life woman named Gracie Atherton (Moore), who was jailed for rape in the ’90s after becoming pregnant by her 13-year-old pet store co-worker Joe Yu (Charles Melton of Riverdale hunger). In an apparent play on the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal, Gracie and Joe remained together throughout her time in prison, and when she left prison, they are still a couple two decades later – a seemingly happy couple who are about to sends his twins off to college.

They say they were in love. They say he seduced her. In particular, they tell all this to Elizabeth – she came to their home in Savannah, Georgia, to spend some time with Gracie and their family for role-playing research. She needs to know all the dirty details and see all the places where they happened. And she needs to sit back and watch Gracie’s every move in order to imitate it. And soon Elizabeth’s vigilance and goading force the couple and their loved ones to talk and explore things they have ignored for a very long time. Add to this the fact that Joe is about to become an empty nester in his early 30s, and we have a situation that can be resolved in the most melodramatic way possible.

Of course, melodrama is fertile territory that Haynes has spent decades mastering. From severe hypochondria Safe to Sirkian dismemberment Far from paradise to those Barbie dolls singing “We’ve Just Begun,” the inflated self-awareness, costs, and hardships of performative life always paved the way for him to begin his stories. Think of the revolving door of personalities that each character in Bowie’s riff Velvet goldmine butterfly is Citizen Kane-esque unraveling of the self, where there is no fixed point for personal identity. We are all built from lies, from stories that someone else tells about us. One of the founders of New Queer Cinema, this has almost always been the main focus of Haynes’ films: queer people know full well, through the brute force of living in this world, how important it is to shape and remake themselves to fit into their current situation. Fine. And no director working today (with the exception of David Lynch, who works in a completely different register) has turned the elasticity of personality into such a magnificent cinematic spectacle.

All this is always present in May December, but the joke of it—and make no mistake, this is an incredibly funny movie to begin with—is how corny all the melodrama is. If you’re initially unsure about how you should perceive this film – I mean tonally, given the dark subject matter – I promise you that at one point Marcelo Zarvos’ huge, almost suffocating score will play over the daytime. is a hot dog picnic drama where any doubts you might have had will be forcefully erased from your brain. Laugh freely and a lot, my friends.

That’s not to say Haynes is making fun of the tragedy at the heart of the story. The film takes Joe’s story of self-awareness (and their children’s story, to a less focused degree) very seriously. And Charles Melton gives a rich and unexpectedly impressive performance in the role, charting a path from numbness and confusion to something approaching understanding, to adulthood. It’s almost a deferred and deferred coming of age story from its end, where Elizabeth throwing an outward fourth wall on his and Gracie’s “story” gives Joe the opportunity to finally see her in the damn horror show that she was. . And this. And yet it’s all about good.

But the gap between the real story, pathetic and sad, and the story that our tabloid culture represents (both the 1990s culture that Joe and Gracie were trying to escape, and the modern version that Elizabeth, with her righteousness, claims that this time they will tell the story with “sensitivity”) wants to impose on her – this is where Haynes finds his satire. In the end, Gracie has to work overtime to shape the story of this “great romance” to her liking, just as Elizabeth tries to create a real juicy role for herself.

And it’s in this woman’s war of wills to decide what the “truth” is that Haynes (along with a delightful script from first-time screenwriter Sami Birch) makes her point. Which story is told, which one is real – is there a real story at all? Well, it depends on who you ask! And so the film’s hysterically aggressive music, projecting a hot telenovela onto teeth-brushing, lies on them and on us – it’s our shared lifelong desire for bad taste turned into real sound and fury.

Moore and Portman are at the top of their games here, showcasing the flourishing of the Almodovarian camp alongside terrifying chasms of emptiness. These two and their tabloids Human

deserve each other. And while Elizabeth’s actions pale in comparison to Gracie’s, neither woman deserves the credit. Elizabeth is absolutely willing to blow up real life for her shitty movie, and she’ll do anything to get what she wants and needs. Her words to Joe after a particularly cruel and exploitative act on her part about how adults act are especially chilling given the context in which she is fully aware of what this man has been through.

For her part, Gracie, who has the most powerful lisp in cinematic history, plays the game right away – in the race for the title of “Most Sociopath”, never count out who’s holding the gun. Moore has long proven that she can project enormous sources of neediness and manipulation masquerading as coquetry (shouts Boogie Nights and Amber Waves’ whole “mother” routine), and that threading, so precise and subtle, is one of the reasons we fell in love with her. But especially when Haynes falls into her hands. Moore’s beginnings in soap operas bubble and froth to a boil again here – those poor innocent bunnies never stood a chance in her sights.

Unreliable narrators telling unreliable narrators, all of whom have conflicting intentions that we can half-gaze from behind comically oversized Hollywood sunglasses – tell me, guys, this isn’t entertainment! May December this insidious miracle of real criminal contradictions – her word, his word, her word, again and again; the whole half-price cereal is shaped and repackaged with the tastes and considerations of the next decade in mind. And all this until no one remembers why we started unclenching our jaws and eating this crap in the first place.

May December screened at the 2023 New York Film Festival. It is scheduled for release in the United States on November 17, 2023.