This review is part of our coverage of the 2023 New York Film Festival.
Step: You can never say that beloved TV and film actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) doesn’t throw herself into the role. For his latest role, Berry travels to Georgia to spend some time researching Gracie Atherton-Yu (Julianne Moore), who became a tabloid sensation in the 1990s when a then-married thirty-year-old Mary Kay Letourneau lookalike slept with 13 -year-old is an old, old merchant named Joe Yu (Charles Melton). She went to prison, had the first of his three children, and married him when she got out of prison.
They now live a happy married life, or so it seems; they move around a lot and still get boxes of poo in the mail from time to time, but their lives are so marred by scandal that it seems strange to them. Besides, they have more important things to worry about, like their upcoming high school graduation.
But the more time Elizabeth spends with them, the more she peels back the layers of their scandal: the indiscretions of Gracie’s previous family that destroyed her, glimpses of discord in her current marriage, and more. Moreover, the mirror begins to stare back at her as her time with Gracie and Joe tests her own moral limits.
Boys are cool! At first sight, May December seems sedate, almost rustic: its characters are gentle and its scenes are played out with smiling Southern hospitality. But director Todd Haynes quickly ups the tone, taking you from contemplative character study to something resembling camp in the blink of an eye.
Gracie Moura is all smiles and greetings from Elizabeth when she arrives, a very sweet lady who takes pineapple upside down cakes with her and gets on with motherhood. Haynes then zooms in on her face looking into the refrigerator while melodramatic strings pierce the soundscape like yellow film (Marcelo Zavros’ score rearranges and reorganizes Michel Legrand’s score from the 1971 play). Mediator), and she mutters, “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs.”
May December (Netflix)
This is a funny and very unpleasant moment – not the last time. May December will delve into these contrasting impulses. This element can be found in every thread of Haynes’s complex tapestry: Moore’s Gracie is a controlling tyrant at crucial moments, throwing passive-aggressive jabs at her daughter’s fashion choices (“You know, I think it’s so cool how you’re not afraid to show me so your hands”) or using a canceled cake order to attract her husband’s attention. Moore equips Gracie with a powerful ability to live in her own small reality, which she asserts with her delicate lisp.
Here’s what adults do: As for Portman, she’s deep within herself. Black Swan here again, playing a character who is searching too deeply for himself in his next role. Her investigation into Gracie and Joe’s conflicting life story feels a bit tense: she spends so much time with the family that she seems to be growing tired of the clan by the end. But she relishes the opportunity to delve into such intricate dynamics, and the act of studying Gracie is itself a delightful transgression for her. She imitates what it would be like to be Gracie (who was Elizabeth’s age when her affair with Joe began) in the pet store warehouse where they were originally caught; an ominous question from a classmate at Gracie’s daughter’s school launches a monologue about filming on-screen sex scenes in which she describes losing the boundary between you and your partner.
It’s this fuzzy boundary violation that fuels much of Haynes’s (and the actors’) best work here: Elizabeth’s intrusion into Gracie and Joe’s lives becomes borderline pathological, so Gracie’s growing discomfort with it is tracked. But why is Gracie so worried? That Elizabeth would portray her inaccurately? Or that she will delve too deeply into who she really is?
For Elizabeth, the deep dive she’s so eager to achieve drives her to poke cracks in the family firmament—whether through old wounds in the old Gracie clan (including Corey Michael Smith as a particularly fickle member of the first group of Gracie children) or by exploiting Joe’s deep-rooted feelings that he may have never really been allowed to grow up. (Melton is great here, easily standing alongside Moore and Portman as the lost boy who feels more like a big brother than a father to his children.)
Verdict: Todd Haynes’ films often feel like a sharp fingernail, digging into the tortured corners of our personal and interpersonal lives to see what truth lies beneath. Isolation, melancholy and transgression are the hallmarks of his works, whether they are Carol, Far from paradiseor Safe; its characters rebel against the rules and codes of polite society, asking you how you should feel about the lines its protagonists cross. May December is no different and perhaps one of the most confident. This is a master class in discomfort.
Where to see: May December will be released in limited release on November 17th and will be released on Netflix on December 1st.
Trailer:
