December 4, 2023 · Watch the trailer
Ten, even fifteen years ago, a film based around the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal would have been overtly sexualized in such a bawdy and audacious way that viewers would have been totally repulsed or titillated by the beyond forbidden relationship.
Any tale about a mature woman who becomes pregnant by a pre-teenage boy is in and of itself risqué by the morally repulsive nature of the narrative. But director Todd Haynes, given enough time and a more objective purview, creates a strange and captivating twist on America’s first teacher-student sex scandal.
His latest film, “May December,” which released on Netflix this past weekend, tells a fictional tale like that of the Letourneau affair years after the scandal has subsided when an actress comes to Georgia to shadow the woman at the center of a pet store romance which led to her arrest for sleeping with a seventh grader.
In recent years, Natalie Portman has feasted on playing emotionally fragile characters and her turn as actress Elizabeth is no different. There is a calm, inquisitive tone to Portman’s performance that slowly turns to borderline obsessive compulsion to replicate her muse in every way and it’s only on repeat viewing that the small emotional, physical, and psychological things similarities come to full bear.
Conversely, Julianne Moore is the more bombastic, forward of the two female leads as disgraced Gracie, whose comfortability in the bubble she has created for herself seemingly begins to fracture under the renewed spotlight of having an actress come into her life.
Though each excels on their own, Portman and Moore are electric in tandem as their admiration slowly twists into disdain and Haynes does a masterful job of portraying this as each woman feels like the opposite side of the same coin, mimicking the other’s mannerisms, lisp, and rhythms in a cat-and-mouse dance of one-upmanship.
“May December” is truly about how both Elizabeth and Gracie are competing to be the character of the woman Gracie has believed herself to be and has showcased to the world for the past two decades. This is true both in the ways that the two get along at the beginning of the film as they size each other up and how they gradually turn things into a competition and pseudo-psychological power struggle for identity.
The blurring of lines between the two becomes demonstrably more intense and Elizabeth’s evolving relationship with Joe really unlocks the inner complexity of the narrative Haynes aspires to, which most audiences won’t understand on an initial viewing.
By far the most powerful moments in the film come when Portman and Moore are facing the camera straight on in a variety of intimate closeups meant to showcase them reflecting on themselves and/or each other in the mirror.
As “May December” ventures further into their nuanced struggle for identity, these scenes take on a more demonstrative, character and narrative focused life culminating in the film’s electric third act scene where Elizabeth recites a monologue from one of Gracie’s letters that shatters all preconceived notions about both women.
While audiences don’t see Moore in the scene, audiences can easily feel her presence in dialogue and the cerebral, almost monotonous way Portman delivers the monologue border the line between demented psychosis and rigid adherence to the persona her actress character is attempting to mold into.
Haynes truly shines in revealing the slow, nuanced ways Elizabeth and Gracie’s characters morph into one as if opposite forces coming together only to repel off in an even more drastic way.
While he’s rarely at the center of the film, Charles Melton perfectly takes on an increasingly complex burden as the now-grown Joe, whose early sexualization at the hands of Gracie has buried an emotional fragility he struggles to carry. In the film’s final act, Melton proves to be equally devastating as his more famous costars and handles Joe’s emerging self-awareness with a beautifully poignant melancholy.
“May December” is far from an easy watch both in narrative and the dryness of tone, which makes it a difficult sell to audiences, though its arrival on Netflix allows it to be well worth a chance for ardent cinephiles this winter.
Leave a Reply