May December
Todd Haynes is no stranger to trafficking in melodrama and soap opera tropes- see his 2002 collaboration with Julianne Moore, “Far From Heaven”- but in “May December,” even he’s pushing himself into a level of artifice revealing honesty that feels like a challenge. That he succeeds is a credit to he and his writer, Samy Burch, at finding just the right balance of emotions to make this film resonate.
The film begins with an actress, Elizabeth (played by Natalie Portman), coming into Savannah. She is here to research an upcoming role. She will be meeting with the subject, Gracie (played by Moore), and her family. Twenty years ago, Gracie had an affair with her now-husband, Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), when he was in 7th grade; now, their children are getting ready to graduate from high school. While the community has been hospitable towards them, Elizabeth being in town brings up old feelings about Gracie, and makes Joe Yoo uneasy as he starts to think differently about what happened.
While the last scene in the movie is the only one on an actual film set, “May December” is a wonderful look at how invasive films can be when they are bringing to life something that was basically tabloid material. In the end, Gracie and Joe Yoo stayed together, but at what cost? And what does a film bring to the equation? Elizabeth talks a lot about revealing emotional truth in her performance, but she doesn’t seem shy in bringing up uncomfortable feelings to people whom might actually be hurt in the process. As much as filmmakers preach about being true to the story, if it’s a story that made headlines for all the wrong reasons, it’s not unreasonable to think that their impulses towards making things more salacious will come out. We see that in moments where Elizabeth is by herself, trying to “get into character,” and we see that in some of her interviews outside of the immediate family, leading to one of the most intriguing endings in recent memory in terms of how it leaves us thinking about both main characters. This is one of Portman’s best performances, and she matches Moore beat-for-beat. We can see that she’s antagonizing Gracie to a large degree, and how it’s impacting her. Her life begins to disintegrate- or appear to- before our eyes, and few actresses play a shaken, strong woman quite like Moore.
The third central character is Joe, and Melton’s performance is as good as everyone’s been saying. In Elizabeth, he sees an unexpected confidant that has him questioning the direction his life took him, and wondering if there is a new opportunity to be taken now that their kids are going off to college. Melton has a moment of honesty with Moore that is devastating because it feels like a discussion that should have happened years ago, but didn’t. It makes me wonder how the ending with Moore’s character plays into that moment, but that plays into an overarching idea of both Elizabeth and Gracie being more manipulative than they let on. “May December” is fairly cold-blooded when it comes to people’s emotions, but it’s Haynes’s great gift that he can make it feel as deviously entertaining as it is, aided by a score from Marcelo Zarvos and Michel Lengrand that plays up the soap opera angle brilliantly. I was on board from moment one, all the way to the endgame as it plays out.
