Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hour, 57 minutes
Writers: Samy Burch, Alex Mechanik
Director: Todd Haynes
Quick Impressions:
“Why are all of this year’s Oscar hopefuls vying to see who can be more…?” I asked my husband, then drew a blank. “Discursive? That’s not right. You know! Sometimes I can be…discursive? That’s not the word I mean.”
It wasn’t the word I meant, but it’s not half-bad as a malapropism. (Shh! I can be discursive.)
But ten minutes later, the word I was looking for suddenly popped into my head—transgressive. And I stand by the question.
Why are all of this year’s Oscar hopefuls vying to see who can be more transgressive? It’s the theme of 2023, I swear! To demonstrate the idea—before I had thought of the word—I kept running through movies, pointedly calling out transgressive behavior.
“Look at the shocking way the characters behave as they question and flout societal convention in Poor Things. But if that’s not bad enough for you, try Saltburn.” (I read today that you can buy Felix’s Bathwater scented candles now.) “Maestro focuses on the ways that Bernstein doesn’t obey convention. Barbie is entirely about rejecting the parts of society that don’t serve us in the most outrageous way possible. You could even make a case for Oppenheimer…”
“Uh yeah,” said my daughter, rolling her eyes at me. “Maybe even Oppenheimer. It might be bad to make a bomb that undoes the fabric of reality and cheat on your wife…”
“Yeah, but that’s what I mean,” I said. “You would think creating the atomic bomb would put you in a class by yourself, but somehow, Oppenheimer pales in comparison to the protagonists of these other movies.” When a man splits the atom, helps to destroy two cities, consorts with Communists, and practices polyamory (40s style, without mentioning it to his wife), you would think he’d be the most transgressive character on the list. But no, his life seems practically pedestrian compared to some others.
What is going on?
Is everybody just mad because our society has failed us? (Now that I write it out, that makes me kind of mad. So maybe that’s reason enough for all the transgressive themes cropping up this awards season.)
I had some doubts going into May December because I’ve seen others describe it as a rare, baffling misfire. But we liked this movie. It won me over very quickly. I regret only our decision to squeeze it in on a school night, dividing my attention more than I would have liked. I was following the movie closely, but I was also cleaning up dinner, doing laundry, and finishing up my meringue mushrooms. It couldn’t be helped, though. The Golden Globes are coming up on Sunday, and we have a lot going this weekend.
The Good:
After hearing mixed things, I was surprised by how much I liked this movie. Probably best I loved its intensely melodramatic score by Marcelo Zarvos that rather quickly establishes the tone of the piece. It’s almost like mock melodrama. We’re invited to imagine the type of movie that could be made about this situation, which itself is serious, dark, and disturbing.
In the very beginning of the movie, Julianne Moore’s Gracie opens the refrigerator, and we get a blast of intense music as she stares in horror into its depths (obscured from the audience by the door itself).
On instinct, I burst out laughing, and my daughter drew back and exclaimed, “Zuul in there?”
“I don’t think we have enough hot dogs,” Gracie proclaims dramatically.
How can you not love a movie that starts like this?
There’s definite a dark comic undertone to the film. During one fairly early conversation, Gracie is having a difficult moment with her son and notes to Natalie Portman’s Elizabeth, “Boys are hard.”
“We know what you think!” my daughter teased.
In some ways, the entire movie plays like a big joke—except it’s not. Right in the center of this story is a glaring, traumatic event that most people would consider child abuse. The film certainly appears to be inspired by the story of Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau. The superficial similarities are glaring.
I remember being a teenager following that scandal as it unfolded…and unfolded…and unfolded. Sex scandals involving teachers and students are (unfortunately) not uncommon. But it is fairly rare for a teacher to become impregnated by her twelve-year-old lover—twice—then after serving some time to end up marrying him. That story continued to evolve in tabloids for what felt like forever.
In this film, Gracie wasn’t Joe’s teacher (though he was the friend of her son). Their relationship began when they worked together one summer at a pet story. But still, it’s hard not to watch and think of Letourneau and Fualaau—even for Fualaau.
In real life, Fualaau complained to The Hollywood Reporter, “I’m offended by the entire project and the lack of respect given to me—who lived through a real story and is still living it.”
When I read that piece—after the watching the film—my jaw dropped as I remembered a scene from May December when Charles Melton’s Joe (the Fualaau character) rants at the Hollywood actress preparing to star in a film version of his story, “This is my real life!” (That might not be word-for-word. He says something like that, that’s it’s not a joke, to him it’s real, it’s his life.)
The whole thing started to seem like a endless, self-referential loop. I told my husband, “You can see Vili Fualaau watched the movie before complaining about it.”
May December takes place years after the sex scandal when the couple (now long married) are about to become empty nesters as their youngest kids graduate from high school. Meanwhile, an actress named Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) has shown up to spend some time with the family to research her role in the upcoming movie. (She’ll play a younger Gracie at the height of the sex scandal).
What I love most about May December is that even though hebephilia is almost universally reviled (when statutory rape is involved), the creepiest character in this film is Elizabeth. She’s seeking out boundaries to push (safely, while in character) because moral gray areas interest her. If she’s to be believed, she’s looking for “bad” characters to play because those are the best ones. And as the film progresses, she slips more and more seamlessly into character with Portman (as Elizabeth) increasingly mimicking the speech patterns, assumed thought patterns, and mannerisms of Moore’s Gracie. Gradually we begin to realize that for Elizabeth, what’s right is playing the character well. What’s moral is good acting. Late in the story, she’s slipped so far into character that she actually seduces Joe herself as Gracie would. Her blatantly disturbing behavior gives the now adult Joe some food for thought and causes him to reevaluate what happened to him when he was younger. Nevertheless, it’s incredibly disturbing behavior by Elizabeth who sees nothing wrong with deliberately triggering and taking advantage of the former victim of statutory rape. What Elizabeth does isn’t illegal, but it sure is creepy! Granted, it highlights for us (and for Joe) how unacceptable Gracie’s behavior is (because Elizabeth mirrors and mimics it). But why is she doing that? To make a good movie, of course!
I love the inescapable thorniness of this! At every moment of May December, we have to ask ourselves, “Who is creepier—Elizabeth or Gracie?” It’s so funny because for most of the movie, Elizabeth is winning the creepy contest hands down. You think to yourself, “This is so inappropriate! Why would anyone think it gives them the moral high ground to behave this way in service of making a movie? Why should anyone deliberately try to be like someone who lives in a moral gray area simply for the sake of entertainment? How do they justify even making this movie?”
And, then, of course, we’re sitting there watching a movie about them making a movie about this event. People wouldn’t behave like Elizabeth if there were no audience. It’s kind of like Rear Window. As the audience, our behavior is just as voyeuristic and disturbing as anyone else’s. And because we’re thinking about movies and making movies and making characters who seem unsettling, there’s kind of a darkly humorous, self-referential quality to the whole thing.
But then, of course, the woman they’re mimicking and building this story around—she seduced a twelve-year-old when she was thirty-six. That’s not funny. And that relationship consumed his life for the next twenty years. That’s not funny, either.
Joe gets the most sympathetic material in the film, and Charles Melton would deserve an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. It’s deeply gripping to watch him as an adult, now the age of the adult who seduced him when he was a child. He’s been feeling the strain of this relationship for a long time, and the events of this film finally enable him to begin to see what happened to him then through more mature eyes.
Juilanne Moore is great, too, mainly because by the end of the movie, we still don’t know for sure what her character is actually like or how to feel about her. By the time I got the chance to see the film, I’d heard some disparaging comments about Natalie Portman’s performance, but honestly, I almost like Portman best just because her character is so unnerving. I think it’s a good performance.
“If someone walked around in my backyard taking notes,” my daughter said early on, “I would have a panic attack.”
I wouldn’t have the nerve to be Elizabeth. (I already feel like that all the time, thanks to my own paranoia. I waste so much energy tying myself in knots with worry that my novel will inadvertently be offensive to someone just in case characters I’ve created resemble people I know. Well, in my case, I worry more than my own dark thoughts expressed on paper will somehow hurt someone. I suppose there’s a part of me that worries that interacting with someone gives them some sort of claim to my own inner thoughts, so they’re not my own anymore. It’s not very rational, come to think of it. But I have a terror of being like Elizabeth so great that I sometimes imagine myself as someone like that as a way to combat it. I, too, like to explore morally gray areas in fiction, but I have a horror of causing harm. I couldn’t research a role like this. After a few days, I would say to Gracie, “You know…let’s find you a doctor.”)
When I was on Jeopardy! a few years ago, someone online (after the episode aired) accused me of trying to pretend to be defenseless, so I could trick my opponents into revealing their weaknesses. It freaked me out. When I went back later to play again, that critique was cluttering up my thoughts. Every time I felt sympathetic toward another player or noticed anything about her at all, I worried we would have to play and then people would say I was cataloging her weaknesses. Talking to her started to feel like casing a house, but I was too scared not to talk to her because I met her first and felt safer around her. This turned into a big complex. I didn’t know how to fight the worry because if I’m sympathetic to someone, I do tend to notice their emotional responses to things. When I finally explained in horror, she pointed me to a hilarious Reductress article about how a man spends twenty seconds writing an offhand comment, and a woman thinks about it for twenty years. (I can’t remember the exact headline.)
I think after I followed someone around studying them so closely, I would feel too close to them to play the character. If I were Elizabeth, I’d think, “I basically am Gracie now. Let’s call off the movie.” (But that would be assuming Gracie wanted the movie called off. I guess Elizabeth does her version of that. She so thoroughly becomes Gracie, she seduces Joe.) This must say something about me. I’m so disturbed by Elizabeth and paralyzed with fear at the thought of becoming her. She’s my favorite character, though, because I, too, love exploring disturbing themes through fiction.
My daughter’s favorite character was Georgie (Corey Michael Smith) which makes sense given her love of ranting against injustice. He’s an enigmatic figure. Of course, we feel sorry for the guy whose mother started sleeping with a boy his own age who was his friend since grade school. But (like most people in this story) Georgie is unreliable and unpredictable.
Best Scene Visually:
Fairly late in the film, Elizabeth reads aloud a letter written by Gracie to Joe. My husband couldn’t stop remarking on how thoroughly Portman (as Elizabeth) mimics Moore (as Gracie) in her delivery, even in her tongue movements. (I was slightly distracted at this moment, doing something with the mushrooms, but Julianne Moore’s tongue is always so visible when she speaks. I knew exactly what he meant.)
Best Action Sequence:
The bonding scene on the roof between Joe and the couple’s son is so touching. It’s so relatable when he says to his son, “I can’t tell if we’re connecting, or if I’m creating a bad memory for you in real time, but I can’t help it.”
I said, “This is just like me!” And my husband jokingly noted now I was everyone in the movie (according to me).
Best Scene:
The best scene is either the last, charged scene between Elizabeth and Joe or the scene just after it featuring a key argument between Joe and Gracie.
But another great moment comes when Elizabeth talks to a classroom full of acting students about what it’s like to do sex scenes on camera.
“If someone said things like this at our school,” my daughter noted, “everyone in the class would make fun of them so hard afterwards. This is the kind of thing we would talk about for days.”
Then later, she said, “I didn’t realize at the time, but that was the point of that scene, that those types of questions are immature because the people asking them have that level of maturity as students. They are too young not to ask questions like that. Kids are immature. That was the point.”
I agree with her, but I think there’s a further point. Elizabeth is already trying to get in character. She’s practicing boundary pushing behaviors by saying things that are borderline inappropriate/shocking to kids. What I’d love to know is this. Is Elizabeth trying to be like Gracie there, or did she take the role because she is already like Gracie (transgressive and predatory), and she’s looking for ways to exercise those tendencies legally? Is she pretending she’s like Gracie, or is she genuinely confessing to the kids what she’s actually like? Maybe it’s a bit of both.
The Negatives:
For a film with a relatively modest runtime, May December packs a punch. To me it felt much shorter than 1 hour, 57 minutes. Honestly, it ended before I was done watching. The film’s (perhaps confusing) tone might not work for some people. It has a flippancy that might be off-putting. After all, a woman seducing, becoming pregnant by, and (eventually) marrying a twelve-year-old is not funny. To be fair to May December, though, that type of story (by virtue of its continuing outrageousness) can provoke reactions of amusement if you’re following it in the tabloids.
Could Todd Haynes have done what Vili Fualaau would have preferred and made a much different kind of film about this same topic? Could he have made a factual, gritty drama even giving us Fualaau’s actual point of view about a complex situation? Yes. But that’s not what he did. Samy Burch’s screenplay works because it tells a fictional story, so it can lean into and explore its unnerving themes with a freedom a dramatic piece of non-fiction could never have. In a sense, this film is Elizabeth, savoring the freedom drama allows to poke around in uncomfortable places. What the film is probably won’t work for everybody, but that doesn’t mean the movie needs to be something else. Does it sometimes give in too heavily to its melodramatic dark comedy? Yeah, but that’s what makes it what it is.
Overall:
I truly enjoyed May December. I don’t expect it to win any Oscars, but I do hope it can pick up a nomination or two. It’s a fun movie (about a serious subject) that I’d be happy to watch again any time.