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Director Todd Haynes brings together a talented ensemble of Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore and Charles Melton to expand your understanding of good and evil.
Todd Haynes May December pits his emotions against each other, enjoying situations that walk a fine line to where morality should land. At certain points, the film can’t help but elicit laughs—especially when composer Marcelo Zarvos delivers his dramatic piano keys that evoke campy melodrama. Then, just when you think you might be having fun, the film acts like a Venus fly trap closing in on you, leaving you wondering why anyone would want all this complexity in the first place.
There are deeply uncomfortable moments where the lines between fiction and reality almost mock each other and sometimes require the viewer to choose a side. Gracie (Julianne Moore) is holed up in a small town in Savannah, Georgia, living with her husband Joe (Charles Melton). They were together for some time, but with one important nuance. At the time, Gracie and Joe were married and had two children. The relationship between Gracie and Joe began when she was in her mid-30s and he was only 13 years old. What started as an unscrupulous hobby at a pet store grew into a family with three children.
Although shame followed this union, in some ways both Gracie and Joe feel trapped in time while living in the area. That is, until TV star Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) stays with the Yu family to delve into their history and understand Gracie’s mannerisms, from saying certain words to wearing makeup every day. Their first meeting was somewhat awkward. Just imagine someone showing up at your home to “upset your character” for an extended period of time – not to mention a situation that you may not want to expose to the public eye anymore. Elizabeth assures Gracie that she wants to be seen when the Yu family is sent a box of human feces.
Francois Duhamel / Courtesy of Netflix
We are assured that they were sent constantly, but in recent months the pace has slowed down. This begs the question of who exactly this film will benefit. Haynes and writers Sami Burch and Alex Mechanic make it clear that what happened between Gracie and Joe was wrong—there’s no argument there. But they also seek to show that the people in this union were harmed by the circumstances they went through, and to take those things into account as well as the crime. With Gracie she’s a little bossy because that’s the only thing in her world she can control. She often attacks Joe over how much beer he drinks and whether he smells like smoke, and sometimes unknowingly passes on to her children some of the parental trauma she experienced as a child.
It’s all a cover because in the quiet moments you can see that she’s falling apart from the inside. Gracie bakes goods for local families, but most buy them out of guilt. If anyone refuses, Gracie will go into a tailspin. Joe has never lived outside of a relationship with someone older than him. He is often silent, aimless, and looks for someone to connect with outside of the home—whether by chatting with someone he met in an online group or with Elizabeth while she is doing her research. It’s almost tragic to watch him worry, knowing that his two children left at home are about to go off to college. Parents are usually delighted at the thought of having an empty nest. This prospect throws Gracie and Joe into a realm of uncertainty as the attraction (if you want to call it that) of their romance seems to be fading.
The third person in the equation is Elizabeth, whose acting chops would make even Jared Leto blush. It first starts with her asking questions to people like the pet store owner, Gracie’s ex-husband Tom (D.W. Moffett) and her eldest son from that marriage. How May December Continuing, Elizabeth tries to convey the feelings Gracie felt during Joe’s date, and in some scenes Portman completely imitates Moore’s mannerisms. Considering how clunky the source material is, you wonder why Elizabeth allows herself to succumb to this process. But there is no collateral damage if you view things as just the role and not the people behind it.
Is Elizabeth just an opportunist? Haynes plays with this concept and if you think it’s one thing, the situations will make you believe otherwise. Does Gracie feel remorse for what she did? At least on the surface, she says she has no regrets. But as the film goes on, you can tell he’s eating her up from the inside. As excellent as Portland and Moore’s performances are, Melton’s performance as Joe takes over in the film’s third act. Joe is now a man who is beginning to realize all that he has missed due to feelings of love that he may not have been able to understand. Gracie is not ready to compare what happened to her in the past, Joe hopes for this day, but he has no one to contact.
By the end May December, you see a marriage in which two people can be in a state of limbo while all the cameras are poised to distort the lens of their story. Everything is confusing, sometimes comical and tragic, because sometimes things are not so easy to define using typical conventions.