There’s only one word for the power games going on between the two main characters in May December: delicious.
I feel bad writing that, because deliciousness isn’t something we should associate with this story, let alone the true-life tale on which it’s based. Inspired by a tabloid scandal from the 1990s, May December introduces us to a married couple with grown children, 20 years after they began their relationship—when she was 36 and he was 13. After her jail time for child rape and a couple of pregnancies, Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton) have settled into a quietly notorious life in Savannah. They seem to be reconciled with the past, until the arrival of Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), who is researching an independent film she’s making, in which she’s set to play Gracie.
It’s the dynamic between Portman and Moore that is electric; every scene between them shivers with a delicate sort of tension—a polite wispiness that at any moment could sting. Gracie and Elizabeth have agreed to collaborate, but both have vastly different motivations for doing so. Portman is a Chesire cat with claws, as Elizabeth politely interrogates Gracie about the past, wielding her stardom like a scalpel. Gracie deftly dodges her at every turn, carrying herself as if she’s the bigger star. There is a knockout moment in which Elizabeth asks to watch Gracie put on her makeup and Gracie suggests it would be better if she performed the routine on Elizabeth. What begins as an innocent gesture—a moment at a middle-school slumber party—shifts into something intimate, then sexual, and ultimately insidious as Gracie suddenly makes direct eye contact for the first time, then snaps shut the lid of the case she’s holding. Elizabeth meant to glean more material from the exercise, but Gracie instead grabs the upper hand.
Here and elsewhere, director Todd Haynes nods to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona by positioning Elizabeth and Gracie side by side, both facing the camera, which stands in for a mirror. There is another such scene—Elizabeth has accompanied Gracie and her daughter as they shop for a high-school graduation dress—where the two women sit on a couch in the dressing room. We see them in the reflection of a larger mirror in the center of the screen, but notice the right side of the frame, where we also see Gracie sitting. She, not Elizabeth, is doubled, suggesting she’s the one playing a part.
In this and other ways, May December is more critical of Gracie than I expected (the script is by Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik). Knowing that previous Haynes films like Far From Heaven and Carol centered on unconventional couples ostracized by society, I expected something more empathetic toward Gracie and Joe’s experience. And while it is in some ways, the film comes to direct its most tender attention toward Joe, capturing the somewhat dazed existence of someone—much like the Priscilla Presley of Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, another excellent film from this year—who has never had the chance to figure out their own way in the world. As Joe, Melton hugely rewards the attention the movie gives him, often in the background trying to not take up too much space, but deeply registering as a soul who has no place of his own.
If the consideration of Joe gives May December something of a moral center, there is still a queasy element of voyeurism to it. Should we be dramatizing this story in any fashion, especially in such entertaining form? (Also delicious is the melodramatic music, a reinterpretation, by composer Marcelo Zarvos, of Michel Legrand’s score for 1971’s The Go-Between.) Indeed, at times May December plays like something of a black comedy, including in its final moments. I won’t give them away, except to say that the ending seems to suggest that the final joke is on Elizabeth—and us.
(12/9/2023)
