‘May December’ Review: Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman Star in Carefully-Constructed Melodrama From ‘Carol’ Director Todd Haynes
(L-R) Natalie Portman as Elizabeth and Julianne Moore as Gracie in Todd Haynes’ “May December”.
Todd Haynes‘ May December is a unique film this year (which has already been filled with an equal number of unique and corporately assembled movies), and ultimately that’s what makes it stand out in the crowd. I first saw this back in October at the London Film Festival and decided to wait to watch it a second time before I could put my thoughts in order and write a review for it, which is why I asked Netflix for a screener ahead of its premiere on the platform this Friday. It’s not that it requires a second viewing to understand what’s going on, but it needs it to fully appreciate the tone that Haynes (Carol) introduces from the very first scene. If nothing else, it’s a perfect example of accomplishing exactly what the filmmakers were going for, a movie that prioritizes tone and setting over story.
Set 20 years after a 36-year-old school teacher had an affair with a 13-year-old boy, the two are still married and about to send their youngest twin kids off to college. Their biggest accomplishment, but also their supervillain origin story, was surviving being the center of attention of the press, and especially the tabloids, once the story broke out. Now, they live a seemingly happy suburban life, where Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton), who get the occasional box filled with S-H-I-T on their doorstep, are getting ready to have their story told properly by an upcoming indie film starring Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman).
Their unstable peace, which includes Joe texting back and forth with someone we never meet or Gracie breaking into tears for seemingly innocuous reasons, will be torn to pieces once Elizabeth joins their daily routines as research for her upcoming movie. She’s as interested in getting Gracie’s mannerisms right as she’s in talking with the people around her to get a sense of what her life was like back then. She starts to get into the role so much that their images slowly begin to blend, to the point that Joe at some point mixes up their names mid-conversation and they essentially wear the same dress to Gracie and Joe’s kids’ graduation.
(L-R) Julianne Moore as Gracie and Natalie Portman as Elizabeth in Todd Haynes’ May December.
May December has a very specific tone, a mix of high camp and melodrama with parody, where the characters don’t even suspect they are part of a cheesy farce. It’s not that it doesn’t take itself too seriously, but rather makes fun of pretty much everything it touches on. That goes from its depiction of tabloid scandals (while essentially setting up the stage for another one) to its way of poking fun at the acting process. Elizabeth is the most standard and also strikingly accurate, depiction of an actress that writer Samy Burch could come up with. She wants to do more plays rather than do so many movies or TV shows, she’s fascinated by her research process and looks for the “seeds” of things that don’t really pop up in her subjects’ lives until much later, she visits key places to Gracie’s past and reenacts (in the most overt way possible) what being there must have felt like, etc.
It was important for Todd Haynes to establish from the very beginning that this is no regular drama about two lives that are still trying to reconcile with their own choices 20 years later and with three kids off to college. And if the nature documentary-like images of a cocoon didn’t do it for you, Gracie spells it out for you two minutes later when she dramatically says, after the music sets the stage: “I think we’ve run out of hot dogs”. And yet, it takes a few minutes for us to realize what exactly Haynes is going for here, hence my necessity to watch it again with that in mind.
May December is all about looking at ourselves in the mirror, a surface that plays a key role throughout the entire film, from an early-on scene where Mary (Elizabeth Yu, she’s one of Gracie and Joe’s younger kids) is trying on different dresses for her gradution while her mom involuntarily (or perhaps not as much?) commends her for being so brave and showing her arms around, not caring for impossible-to-meet beauty standards — all while Portman’s Elizabeth is by her side trying to get to the bottom of what happened 20 years ago when a 13-year-old boy impregated a 36-year-old woman.
Look at the image at the top of the article as well, where Haynes divides the frame in two to show us the two characters in front of a mirror — there you can already start to see how the lines between both women start to blur. There are still a lot of differences between the two, yet it’s their similarities that stick out — and that ridiculousness is also some of what Haynes is making fun of here.
Natalie Portman as Elizabeth in Todd Haynes’ “May December”.
The story of May December is all about asking us to take a look at our own lives. Most of us haven’t been a part of a national scandal like Gracie and Joe were, and yet we’re infinitely afraid of looking back at our own actions and acknowledging that was us at the very center. Gracie, meanwhile, doesn’t show the slightest bit of remorse: we’re told that, back in the day, she didn’t understand at all why what she did was so bad, thinking that once she had the chance to explain to the world that they were actually in love, all would be forgiven. Today, she still stands by that belief, thinking that Joe was a very different kid than the rest back then, more mature.
The hope is that with the film, Elizabeth will be able to capture something “true” — but whatever that means isn’t really defined, which is also in and of itself a way of making fun of the surreal process of acting immersion. Elizabeth goes beyond method acting to pretty much trying to become Gracie; in the film’s final scenes she finally starts to unlock that side of her personality after so much research, some aspects of it more practical than others.
But the real drama in the film is with Joe, and there’s a completely different movie (perhaps not as interesting, perhaps a lot more, depending on how the storyteller would be able to draw parallels with a viewer who hasn’t lived anything remotely similar) about how Joe’s character reacts to being close to legally sharing a beer with his youngest kids before he turns 40. Has he thrown his life away by changing diapers at 15 or is he now in a blue-sky position where he can look for a new life as his wife begins to crumble under the pressures amounted to by her past? How does he feel about having his kids graduate at the same time as his wife’s grandkids? Charles Melton is the standout of the film, and it’s too bad (or maybe too perfect) that he was the third wheel to Portman and Moore (both are pitch-perfect, perfectly understanding the assignment and carrying it out to a tee).
The title of the film, as Haynes explains in the press notes, is a term for a relationship between two people of very different ages, yet it also has a nice, poetic ring to this story. Set in the weeks leading up to the twins’ high school graduation (in May 2015), May December is all about the couple’s next big tabloid story — after all, while it was all in print 20 years ago, it’s about to be rediscovered by audiences who see the new film and will draw their own conclusions from it. Can Natalie Portman’s Elizabeth capture something “true”? Perhaps, but her research process wasn’t without harm, as it opened up new wounds in the relationship and highlighted others that were hiding in plain sight. So what happens to Joe and Gracie, once Elizabeth and the kids leave? Between May and December, the aftermath will really be felt.
In the end, May December is a film I appreciate more than I like. It’s different from anything you’ll watch on Netflix this weekend, which is, alone, a reason to check it out, but it feels like it was made with such an artistic and specific vision behind it that it shouldn’t be missed. But in the end, and even factoring in Melton’s last moments on screen (when his character watches the graduation ceremony as the weight of his own life story wears down on him), it lacked the emotional punch that a story like this probably deserved, which is why I was left a bit unsatisfied. Whether or not delivering an emotional experience was Haynes and Burch’s may goal, I don’t know for certain, but that’s the kind of story I gravitate toward.
May December is currently streaming on Netflix in select countries, including the US and Canada. Other territories will get a theatrical distribution in the coming weeks.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
