NYFF 2023 Film Review: May December
A MASTERPIECE OF HIGH-WIRE CINEMA
A thorny balancing act of different tones that drills straight into sordid psychodrama and the elusive nature of performance, Todd Haynes’ May December is a masterpiece of high wire cinema. As expected, Natalie Portman and Juliane Moore are tremendous, but it’s Charles Melton — as a boy stuck in time and a discomfiting stasis — who runs away with the entire thing. May December will make your head spin. Minor spoilers ahead…
Suburban Savannah mom Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) stares into her fridge as a jagged shiv of a piano motif pierces the air, drawing a creeping look of horror across her face. “We’re going to need more hot dogs,” she says. Barely five minutes into May December, this deliberate collision of tone is specifically designed for laughs: the lowest of kitchen-bound stakes vaulted into high melodrama with a sinister musical cue. With online obsessives, the debate of whether May December is “camp” - a designation the director himself bristles against - rages on, a fruitless parley that obscures the perplexing threads woven together by an alchemist of a filmmaker. A movie about an unrepentant sexual predator and her victim christened by The New York Times as “the most fun film” at Cannes this year, Todd Haynes’ latest mines the thorniest splinters from a cauldron of tabloid sensationalism, which just so happens to hit every register between biting comedy and devastating drama with deadly accuracy. Amidst a knotty juggling act that just shouldn’t work as well as it does, Haynes conjures one of the best films of the year simply because he never forgets the gravitational force of the singularity at its center: the truth.
Over 25 years ago in 1997, Mary Kay Letourneau was a 34-year-old schoolteacher in Seattle when her sexual relationship with a preteen student landed her in the supermarket aisle spotlight and in prison for over seven years. A twisted perversion of blonde, maternal authority, Letourneau would maintain her innocence - and deluded victimhood - throughout her life, even authoring a book with her illicit lover: Un Seul Crime, L’amour, or “only one crime, love.” After her release from incarceration, the two would wed and start a family. Letourneau and Vili Fualaau eventually receded from public view, leading to their eventual divorce and Letourneau’s death in 2020 from cancer, but their scandal would forever be ingrained in the annals of pop consciousness and tabloid history.
Amidst a knotty juggling act that just shouldn’t work as well as it does, Haynes conjures one of the best films of the year…
Haynes’ May December - a barbed analog of the real-life scandal - picks up where our collective, cultural memory ends: 20 years into a life of domesticity still creaking from the remnants of scrutinized infamy. In this fictionalized parallel, it’s 36-year-old Joe Yoo (Charles Melton) and his 59-year-old wife, Gracie Atherton-Yoo, who have three college-age children and live in Savannah, Georgia. The sands of time have largely eroded the public lens and gossip rag salaciousness, but for the Yoos, a maelstrom of repression - a child-rape trial, a baby born behind bars, years of surrounding moral outrage - swirls behind the scenes. Complicating matters is Haynes’ injection of an interloper: Natalie Portman’s Elizabeth Berry, an actress set to play Gracie in an upcoming film. Swooping into Savannah to shadow the Yoo family for research, Elizabeth aims to study her role and glean some understanding of the woman beneath the scandal. “My gosh, well, I want you to tell the story right, don’t I?” Gracie chirps. In the film’s second set-em-up, knock-em-down punchline, Elizabeth hands Gracie a mailed package from her doorstep: a box of human feces sent by a local contingent of haters.
Excavating the nooks and crannies of Gracie’s psyche from those surrounding her - her stunted husband, her college-bound kids, even her family from a previous marriage - Elizabeth begins to obliterate boundaries in her research. Slinking into Joe’s workplace and discussing sex scenes with the students at the local high school, Elizabeth’s intrusions promise to make the Yoos’ story “feel seen and known,” but in reality build a pressure cooker of tensions between actress and subject. May December, in less deft hands, would have loved to explode into a superstar Moore-Portman catfight, but Haynes is more than able to resist the temptation. Halfway through the film, the two women share a mirror and apply makeup, masks drawn on and mutual contempt barely concealed. At the center of May December is a crackling meditation on performance; for Elizabeth, it’s performance as predatory exploitation, for Gracie, it’s performance as purgatory, a fragile attempt to control the narrative of her life and her ever-repeated self-assurance: “I did nothing wrong.”
“It’s no surprise that Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman are in top form as opposite, circling vipers, but it’s Charles Melton that fully devastates…”
It’s no surprise that Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman are in top form as opposite, circling vipers, but it’s Charles Melton that fully devastates with the film’s single best performance. Casting his Riverdale himbo good looks into the husk of a receded man, Melton embodies a boy frozen in time. With his own children bound for college and himself the age Gracie was when the two began their torrid affair, Joe stares through glassy eyes at the youth he was never able to live; May December is teeming with dark comedy, but the choice for Melton to play it straight conjures a nuanced, gutting depiction of an abuse victim. Has Gracie’s repressed guilt actually transformed every menial inconvenience - hot dog shortages, canceled pie orders - into meltdown-worthy travesties? Or are they staged for Joe’s sympathies? These questions bubble beneath every surface of Melton’s actions, and make for debilitating cinema when they boil over. A late scene strikes at the heart of Joe’s numbing condition as he shares a moment with his son, sobbing: “I can't tell if we're connecting or if I'm creating a bad memory for you in real time.” Even later, a bruising bedside confrontation with Gracie reveals latent trauma and a gnawing truth: “What if…I wasn’t ready to be making those kinds of decisions?”
An impenetrable chameleon of a movie about abuse, celebrity, and damaged people fixed in place, it’s shocking how often May December topples its foundations every time you think you’ve found your footing. Even as the film is gearing up its closing credits, there’s still a coup de grâce of a coda that picks up crumbs placed along the way, delivering the discombobulating fruits of Elizabeth’s intrusive labor. May December’s clever finale is only one of a myriad of takeaways to be plundered from its rich thorniness, perhaps blurred by its immense balancing act, but the one thing that’s for certain is the acidity of its sadness. Simultaneously exploring decayed domestic spaces and their exploitation by feckless entertainers, Todd Haynes drills so deep into the layers of truth and artifice it will make your head spin.
