May December
“May December” opens with a lot of confusing activity happening in two different places. A glamorous woman (Natalie Portman) checks into a boutique hotel, talking quietly into her Bluetooth. Another woman (Julianne Moore) is planning a gathering at her waterfront house. She opens the fridge and stares inside. The camera then pushes in on her face as the music swells ominously. It’s so over the top that you wouldn’t be surprised if there were a severed head in there. This is the first real indication of what the movie is going to do and how it will do it. To nobody in particular, the woman says flatly, “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs.”
Todd Haynes sees the terror in everyday life, the hollowness of ritual, the abyss beneath conventional trappings. He grew up on 1950s melodramas and all that psychosexual Technicolor torment, this stuff isn’t just stylish window dressing for him. It’s emotional states of being. Haynes finds humor in these juxtapositions but knows that horror is real. What happens in “May December” is so grave it feels unsafe even to laugh about it. This sense of peril is part of what makes the movie perversely enjoyable. “May December” may be one of his most unbalancing and provocative films.
Elizabeth Berry (Portman) is a television actress who has come to Savannah, Ga., to meet Gracie Atherton (Moore), whom she will be playing in an upcoming “indie” film. Gracie has agreed inexplicably, once you know everything to let this stranger hang out with her family for a week or so, during which time her twins will graduate from high school. What could this nondescript lady whose biggest worry is running out of hot dogs have done to inspire a movie? Turns out that 20 years ago, Gracie, a 36 year old married woman with kids, had an “affair” with a fellow employee at a pet shop. This fellow employee, named Joe, was in the seventh grade. Gracie went to prison, where she gave birth to Joe’s baby behind bars. The tabloids went nuts for the story; obviously. After serving her time, Gracie and Joe got married and have been together ever since. They have three children together now and are about to be empty nesters. Joe (Charles Melton) is now 36 himself, the same age Gracie was when they met in the pet shop.
Samy Burch’s script takes some inspiration from Mary Kay Letourneau but adds more layers upon layers of strangeness and subjectivity onto it all. The film couldn’t care less about “what happened” or “why.” “May December” doesn’t make declarative statements. Every time you think there’s solid ground pow! the tectonic plates shift beneath you and you’re left reaching for air. The events of “May December” are so objectively monstrous that they beg for a moral judgment to be handed down and yet the deeper it goes the more disorienting things become. It is unsettling to be disoriented in a movie about this topic.
One of the tricks is how Elizabeth seems to change. To begin with, she appears perfectly pleasant just a woman doing her homework for a job she’s thrilled about. Her career, we gather from some short cues, has been less than fulfilling; she wants something hard. She’s ignorant because everyone shuts up whenever Gracie and Joe’s past is mentioned in front of her; this makes her us. But then she goes to talk to a high school drama club, and during the Q&A portion things take such a weird turn that it’s one of the most uncomfortable scenes in a movie full of uncomfortable scenes. You have to completely re-think Elizabeth at this point. And after that you won’t be done.
Elizabeth begins unknowingly but unmistakably to copycat Gracie. The hand gestures, the lisp in her voice, the fashion choices and even the shade of lipstick all are mirror images (speaking of mirrors, there are multiple scenes involving them. At one point Elizabeth is bookended by two Gracies, they’re all sitting in exactly the same way). There’s an extended “Persona” esque scene where both characters stare right into camera next to each other as Gracie puts on makeup while Elizabeth watches raptly. It’s predatory for Elizabeth to want so badly actively work toward becoming Gracie, another one of those strange things about a movie that revolves around an actual legal predator. What Portman has done here is very tricky because it happens by degrees: Is she changing because she’s “becoming” Gracie or because the real Elizabeth is finally being seen? I never got my equilibrium back after Portman read me that line “This is what grown ups do.”
Julianne Moore’s performance is fascinating because at some point you have to entertain the idea that there isn’t much more going on with Gracie beneath the surface. She doesn’t think she did anything wrong; she loves her husband. She talks to Elizabeth, totally unaware of how “off” she seems given the circumstances. “I was very sheltered,” she says, “and he matured very fast.” Does she know what that sounds like? Julianne Moore is not here to give you answers on a platter if you’re looking for them. It’s brave work, and interesting.
Joe (Charles Melton) is this sick system’s heart and soul. When he isn’t drinking beer or watching his butterfly collection, he spends his free time which Gracie treats as though it were time owed her doing chores. He doesn’t communicate much with body language, instead it’s like Joe is rooted to the spot. Charles Melton is tall and strong but acts as if he were invisible in the role of Joe. He takes up no space at all, emotional or physical. At one point Joe breaks down crying in front of his teenage son “I can’t tell if we’re connecting or if I’m creating a bad memory for you.” It’s devastating stuff, both Gracie and Elizabeth are dominant and controlling characters, so it’s easy to forget just how much damage Gracie has done until we see now beaten down by life hen pecked husband Joe who adds yet another layer to the human tragedy portion.
The above score is Marcelo Zarvos’ adaptation of Michel Legrand’s score for Joseph Losey’s 1971 film “The Go Between.” In it, a breezy beautiful Julie Christie befriends a lonely schoolboy who she uses to get to her secret lover, another movie about a May December “friendship” with serious long term consequences. Kelly Reichardt collaborator cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt shoots Savannah and its soft light like it’s not real, it feels as if there are no real textures or surfaces in the world. The light is bright but not warm. The scenery is beautiful, but the beauty doesn’t matter.
The house, trees, waterfront these are just “trappings.” They do not have any kind of purchase on anyone. They are not stable. No character has absorbed them or been absorbed by them. Haynes used similar effects in his Sirkean tribute “Far from Heaven,” but there, the soundstage aesthetics reflected the characters’ passions and repressions. In “May December,” they don’t. Imagine a life so far removed from reality that the people who live beneath trees can’t see them.
This brings me to something I keep thinking about From the very first scene, when we see Elizabeth taking her suitcase out of her rental car, we hear the noises of the town a marching band at a nearby college, cars passing, et cetera. A group of people on a walking tour of Savannah strolls by their guide gives some historical facts, they’ll be back later. In almost every exterior scene in “May December,” even at night, a walking tour moseys past in the background while some guide drones on about some horrible thing that happened right here in this very spot as we cut our eyes toward history without looking up from whatever’s happening right now because human beings do not learn anything from history except that other people had it worse than us. We cluster together to hear horror tales from long ago, we relish others’ misfortunes. We push to the front of the crowd to get a better spot at the execution, and afterward, we move on, sated. Until next time. That’s our voracious expression; that’s Elizabeth’s voracious expression.
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