May December review: An intoxicating portrait of an emotional predator
Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore are transcendent in Todd Haynes' tabloid-inspired melodrama
Film Reviews May December
From its very first shot Todd Haynes’ May December announces itself as a wildly intoxicating, intentionally strident provocation. Close-up images of Monarch butterflies and their surrounding manicured flower gardens are scored by the theme from Joseph Losey’s 1971 film The Go-Between. The archly dramatic music lends a discomfiting feeling to the scenes of domesticity (a cookout for friends and family in Savannah, Georgia) that soon follow. Such a jarring juxtaposition, best encapsulated by said music leading into a character complaining about not having enough hot dogs, sets up a film that wants to suture the lurid and the mundane, creating in the process a masterful meditation on performance and predation.
Georgie and Joe (Julianne Moore and Charles Melton) have lived in Savannah their entire lives. On this particular day, they are hosting a friendly get-together where their two youngest kids (twins soon to be high school graduates), as well as their friends and neighbors can all enjoy some of those aforementioned hot dogs, not to mention one of Gracie’s famed cakes. Such vision of domestic contentment (it’s not quite bliss as there’s a rehearsed intimacy between them) belies a sordid history everyone’s all too happy to avoid; except for the fact that famed actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) has arrived to get to know Gracie better before playing her in a movie. A movie that will yet again unearth the tabloid headlines that first made their romance national news.
For, as we slowly learn from bits and pieces of conversation and many a clipped news headline pored over by Elizabeth in her hotel room, Gracie first met Joe when they worked together at the same pet store in the early 1990s. She was married with kids. Her affair with a seventh grader became gossip news fodder once she was arrested, all while she professed to have fallen in love with the young man, whom she’d later marry and start a family with after serving time. This is all backstory and backdrop for May December, which relishes instead in following urbane and sophisticated Elizabeth as she yearns to connect with sunny and naive Gracie so as to gather enough “truth” to bolster her performance. That means shadowing Gracie at home (as she bickers with her teenage son and needles at her teenage daughter; as she bakes cakes and makes flower arrangements), and probing her with questions about her past (which Gracie handily deflects, telling the actress she rarely spends time fussing about what was or what could’ve been).
The cool detachment Elizabeth must wrestle within herself as she gets to know Gracie drives her conversations with many around town, all of whom feed her and us wildly varying versions of what happened and how it was apprehended by the woman at its core. Her ex husband, her lawyer—even her son (the same age as Joe!)—seem to feed Elizabeth with enough clues as to how best to understand Gracie; a wounded young wife, a knowing older lover, a fretful mother. The actress’ inquiry, which Samy Burch’s screenplay openly presents as a selfish intellectual exercise masquerading as an empathetic plea for understanding, slowly begins to reveal cracks in Gracie and Joe’s life, in their story. Or so Elizabeth tells herself. So she needs to tell herself; for she can only grapple with Gracie as a character in dire need of an explanation, less so as a woman who yearns to simply be and bake and cook and go out to dinner with her family.
It’s perhaps why Elizabeth so focuses on Gracie’s wispy mannerisms, her muted girlish hair and makeup, and her distinctive sibilant lisp (which only an actress like Moore could elevate above caricature). Making herself as malleable as can be, losing her smoky eyes, severe hair style and movie star jeans/blazer combo in favor of Gracie’s softened features and shirt dresses gives Elizabeth an in, even as she struggles with getting at the root of who Gracie was, is, could be. Conflicting accounts and ideas and memories are harder and harder to parse out into a tidy character study.
And as the two women dance around one another, with equal parts suspicion and seduction, Joe is driven toward the kind of self-examination that risks upending everything he’s known and thought about himself. Here the music cues from The Go-Between help place us squarely in yet another story about stolen innocence and torrid affairs: in Melton’s commanding performance, Joe soon reveals himself to us as both too old and too young for his age. He’s a father who can’t quite connect with the youthful abandon of his son and a husband who’s forced to baby a wife prone to fits of hysterical tears in bed. No surprise Elizabeth would, in a canny bit of method acting, insinuate herself into his world with increasingly dangerous results.
With May December Haynes has crafted an implausible blend of raw authenticity and stylized histrionics that’s fueled by a curious intellectual inquiry: what role do we play in our own story? With his choice of actresses, Haynes offers up differing approaches to performance that further muddle the brilliant ambiguity that pulses throughout Burch’s screenplay. Moore, here reuniting with her Safe and Far From Heaven director, has long thrived with motherly roles that she arrives at with grounded flair. A bold actress who tackles her performances with unguarded fearlessness, she here turns Gracie into a warm cipher of a woman who wears her ingenuity with such nakedness you don’t notice how much of it is not just an armor but a sly weapon. Hers is a portrayal that refuses the pull toward coherence, toward story. Moore is Gracie, in that facile pull-quote conflation us critics are prone to so using.
On the other end of the spectrum is Portman, who’s long excelled in bringing steely if brittle insecure women to the screen. With a performance that should sit right alongside her Oscar-nominated ones (Closer, Black Swan and Jackie), Portman deploys yet another signature portrayal of a woman seducing and being seduced by the thrill of who they may yet be. As an actress whose portrayals often demand to be understood, as if existing within quotation marks, she’s a perfect match for Elizabeth. Lost in a world where all she sees are performers, Portman’s Elizabeth keeps finding Gracie much too slippery a person to anchor with whispered intonations and pink-hued blush. Fitting that, in a late monologue played in front of a mirror (the film’s central image and metaphor) where Elizabeth seems to finally capture who Gracie is, we get to witness Portman-doing-Elizabeth-doing-Moore-doing-Gracie in what is arguably one of the most searing onscreen moments in her storied career. It’s an astounding scene that leaves us, just as it does Elizabeth, with frightful fits coursing through our bodies.
This is all to say: May December, a prickly story about performance and persuasion, about prejudgments and predation, is a triumph. Its final moments alone will be rattling in the viewer’s head for days, if not years, to come. And its trio of performances, all perfectly calibrated to Haynes’ tricky tonal tightrope, are a wonder to behold and the better, perhaps, to be savored upon repeat viewings.
May December opens November 17 in select theaters, and arrives December 1 on Netflix
26 Comments
Georgie and Joe (Julianne Moore and Charles Melton) have lived in Savannah their entire lives.Reading the rest of the article, one figures out Gracie is Julianne Moore. Georgie is a typo.
A little too much Burns & Allen on the mind, I can only assume.
Say goodnight to the folks.
Even leaving out that gaffe, I still had to read the credits to figure out which character is which. The review is confusing AF.
I agree. I thought maybe I should go back and read it all again, but leaving this comment seemed like a better use of my time.
Definitely. The review excuses directorial opaqueness as brilliance.
Eh, main character names are a small, unnecessary detail, why bother to correct
AI already proving it’s as lazy as humans
So… who is Georgie?
I clarified it in my pending comment. Guess it’s still greyed cause they don’t like to be corrected.
It would be helpful for AVClub’s longevity to ungrey more accounts. We need them to be constructive contributors, not porn-posting trolls, naturally, but bringing more folks to be visible at the Kinja party would still be a big help to the engagement stats.
Mistakes happen. Even after my comment was promoted, the article wasn’t fixed.We’re still in the greys…
We’re still in the greys…
The lament of Kinja for the ages!
From one grey to another, thank you. I was an active poster pre-kinjapocolypse but I’ve pretty much given up at this point.
Pennywise takes care of him early on in the film, so it’s okay to have forgotten.
I hope Julianne Moore wins an Oscar for playing Georgie.
Hell yeah. Hard work playing your own character and your character’s son.
Those Riverdale boys are always having to fend off predatory female teachers
This is honestly the first I’ve heard of this film, but put Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman in a film and you have my attention. What an incredible pair of leads.
Them: The movie has Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.
Me: Yes
Them: The plot is…
Me: I said yes
Them: Do you want to watch the trailer?
Me: JUST TAKE MY MONEY!
i’m dissapointed that this is wasn’t camp or melodramtic enough. The way people squealed about this since the trailer, i was expecting something more delicious. still enjoyable but i just wanted it to be more bat-shit.
i enjoyed the film but i was expecting it to be more bat-shit crazy/melodramtic than it was. A sprinkle of John Waters would have made this a classic.
Deeply disturbing film. Melton was great as well! I imagine he’ll do well on the awards circuit.
My favorite thing I have seen all year.
Yeah nah, this might have Oscar bait written all over it, but I’m not in favor of sitting down for two hours to watch one character try to deflect, ignore and tapdance around her pedophilia (and then gets married to the same kid she groomed after she gets out of prison?? 🤮🤮)
SPOILERS HERE: In spite of the gushingly adoring review, the movie left me cold. Perhaps I should see it again, but the point of the entire exercise, beyond “how can we know another person if we truly aren’t aware of who we are” was so much more interestingly and eloquently (if long-windedly) conveyed in “Anatomy of a Fall.”The acting by everyone was great, yes, but I do wonder if the reviewer skirted around some issues, mainly that, the toxicity of the mother toward her childrens’ weight, her own crippling mental health issues, her predatory grooming of a young boy, cannot be simply and charitably waved away by her own declaration that she is “naive” or that the seventh grade boy was the actual predator. While this central issue of their marriage becomes evident in a late scene, it is soon skirted, and we are back at square one. Switch the genders and the review might have skewered a male for the same actions that here seem to be easily forgiven of the clearly troubled matriarch.It’s not that I expect, or want, a movie to state its themes in Helvetica bold, but opening the door perhaps just a crack more could help the viewer avoid resigning to directorial ambiguity.I mean, did she shoot the fox, or grant it mercy? Is the fox the central metaphor (a foreshadowing of the hunter forgiving her prey, letting it run free), or is it the butterfly, a chrysalis hanging delicately and precariously, cared for, if not coddled, to be released after its transformation? We get this feeling toward the end, when mother and father don’t sit together at graduation, especially after Portman tells the husband he needs to take care of number one (and earlier when he returns home, flummoxed and even angry, privately, that he must once again console her for another of her spells of depression). I get that there are no easy answers so often in life, but so much open-endedness in a movie feels onanistic on the part of the director.I do agree that the movie’s high point was Portman’s monologue, which we realize only at the end was “Georgie’s” (still not corrected???) only surviving love letter to her seventh grade love – the most illuminating clues in the screenplay to her confusion and passion and trepidation and self-loathing and existential pain – no matter its source. And what of her son’s proclamation that Gracie’s (see how easy to type?) core trauma is due to abuse from her older brothers? And the shock surprise that Gracie and her estranged and extremely troubled son from the first marriage speak every day and that it isn’t true?There’s also Portman’s brilliant, matter of fact delivery of the line “This is what adults do,” after luring the young husband to her own bed (perhaps the first time ever an asthma atomizer has replaced the idea of coming up to see one’s etchings). The husband’s misreading of the lack of mutual caring, his neediness to the point of starvation, her calculating and also abusive and predatory catching of the butterfly in her thespian web, not to mention his “research” into her – a litany of limerence, media stalking of her commercials and interviews (is this his MO in “courting,” and one wonders, was he as calculating as a seventh grader?), are all instances bearing closer scrutiny in hopes of finding meaning.
And what of the (too) young father and his son, the male twin to the yang sister, sharing that joint on the rooftop? It seemed a brilliant comment on the predicament of the seventh grader who leapfrogged adolescence into fatherhood and marriage, intimating that his own son was somehow not only more mature, but is much more aware of the twisted, manipulative dynamics of the family he yearns to escape? It doesn’t bode well for a father who nearly falls off the roof after a few tokes of his son’s joint to find life saving stability in his high offspring. So is the viewer meant to see the husband and wife as doomed to play out their co-dependent tragedy/farce, or does the butterfly soon take to the air?
At the end, we’re left with something most everyone already knows – method actors, such as Portman, Hoffman, Day Lewis, Streep – live to burrow into the skins of their subjects – an act often filled with as much hubris as earnest artistic integrity, that filmic attempts at fiction rarely illuminate truth of the subject in the favor of plot points and sensationalism, and that a review should at least attempt to delve into the many questions of a difficult film rather than excuse them as lauditory praise of opaqueness. If the “joy” in deciphering a movie lies in the many questions it raises, which beget more questions, the reviewer at least owes it as part of their job to begin a list of them.
Plus, NEVER give your offspring a scale as a gift – and never double down with the excuse that it’s what your mother did when you left for college – the weight of that family tradition is more than any child breaking free of home should ever be made to bear.