‘May December’ – Review
With a taut and haunting tension, filmmaker Todd Haynes takes audiences into an uncomfortable place with this pulsating psychological drama May December, and this deep tale of a past crime and its present consequences brings out incredible performances from the film’s co-leads Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman.
Twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance, a married couple (Julianne Moore, Charles Melton) buckle under the pressure when a Hollywood actress (Natalie Portman) meets them to do research for a film about their past.
Todd Haynes is a filmmaker who has always remained true to himself as a filmmaker, choosing to tell stories that stretch the canvas of a given narrative while always inspiring an emotional reaction from his audience. May December fits this mould exactly. Inspired by the scandalous life of Mary Kay Letourneau, May December tells the story of actress Elizabeth Berry (Portman), who gets drawn into the lives of Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), a woman who in 1992, was caught having sex with her son’s 12-year-old school friend Joe Yoo, and who despite her criminal conviction has built a life with Joe (Charles Melton), raising a family, and seeming to have a normal life. But there’s nothing normal about Gracie. Haynes builds out a bubbling psychodrama that soon becomes a battle of wills between the two women as Elizabeth falls deeper into Gracie’s torrid past life and the consequences that have followed her.
Haynes keeps his audiences on the edge of their seats the whole time with this one, and while there’s an everyday presence of normality, there’s always the crime and the trauma that follows from it. Haynes looks at the very idea of scandal in both the past and present and how there are some choices we can never run from. He also frames the story around the actress and subject, making it all the more intense of an experience, as while Elizabeth is looking for ‘truth’, when she finds it in Gracie, it’s far more scarring than she could have imagined. May December is all about the subtext and tone, and a plethora of emotions from love to happiness, jealousy to anger, and indifference to sincerity all play out, and your mind gets taken for a ride with this picture.
There’s a reason Julianne Moore is regarded as one of the best actresses working today, and the Academy Award winner gives a hell of a turn in her performance as Gracie Atherton-Yoo. Her performance is best described as two-faced, with Gracie appearing as the perfect presentation of the Southern hostess who has built a life for herself and her new family despite her crime and torrid past. But behind this clear side of her is an unpleasant nastiness, a spiteful contempt of those around her, and Moore gives you the impression that there’s much more to Grace than at mere face value. It’s a powerful and, at times, unsettling performance, and you never quite know where Moore is going to do with her performance.
Playing in direct opposition to Moore is Academy Award winner Natalie Portman, who matches her toe-to-toe with her performance as actress Elizabeth Berry, who is meeting with Gracie, Joe and their family for research into a new film about Gracie’s life and the scandal that erupted. Portman’s performance has an almost voyeuristic quality to it as she becomes dangerously close to Gracie and Joe, the ‘subjects’ of her performance, and as she desperately tries to understand what would lead Gracie to commit the act that she did. Like Moore’s own performance, there’s a tension to Portman’s character and her pursuit of Gracie as a character, and this tension does reach a boiling point that audiences won’t expect.
Praise must also be lavished on Charles Melton, a rising star on the Hollywood scene, which throws away his usual youthful bravado and presents a clear and fractured portrait of a man who seems lost in the world and with the choices he made. As the now 35-year-old Joe, whose own children with Gracie are about to graduate from high school, we see a man struggling with his life’s choices and an event that he can never run away from. It’s through Melton’s performance and the perspective of the characters around him that we see the events of his past with Gracie in a new life, and Haynes keeps things on a razor’s edge the entire time. All of it leads to a disturbing emotional reaction, and the psychological complexities of the story lead to a disquieting conclusion.
May December is a picture from a filmmaker who is in complete control of his craft, and its unexpected narrative and characters, plus the layered and complex performances of the film’s cast, will keep audiences on edge and close to shock right to the very end.
Image: Transmission Films
