NATHAN WEINBENDER:
The actress arrives with the stated purpose of doing some deep research for her next role. She’ll be playing a real person, a woman who, in the early 1990s, made headlines when was arrested for having a sexual relationship with a 7th grade boy. She and that boy, now in his mid-30s, are still together and living in the town where the scandal unfolded. Now the actress is hoping to spend time with them, observe them, see how they tick.
Such is the setup of Todd Haynes’ May December, but those sordid details merely scratch the surface of the tensions and motives roiling beneath. This is a twisted farce about exploitation, delusion, perception and power, a movie that, like its characters, never completely lets us in on all of its secrets.
Natalie Portman plays the interloper, Elizabeth, a TV and B-movie actress who perhaps sees this part of a complicated, vilified woman as the next step in a great career. We wonder what exactly is in it for the subjects of her research. Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton), the couple once at the center of a media firestorm, are now play-acting a life of normal domesticity, hosting family barbecues and preparing to send their kids off to college and looking the other way when a box of human feces shows up on their doorstep.
We follow Elizabeth as she meets and interviews people in Gracie’s and Joe’s lives, from the owner of the pet shop where the original crimes took place to Gracie’s wayward son from her first marriage. She closely studies Gracie, too, subtly adopting her posture and speech patterns and learning all about her morning makeup regimen. And she gets closer to Joe, who always seems to be walking on eggshells, and probably for good reason.
The screenplay for May December, by first-time writer Sami Burch, is always shifting in style and tone, and just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, it mutates into a different beast altogether. At the heart of this story is the specter of 1990s tabloid sensationalism, and the movie’s attitude toward that sensationalism itself keeps changing. It begins by satirizing it, then succumbs to it, even indulges in it, and then finally leaves us to contend with the wreckage in its wake. That it so closely mirrors the true life details of the Mary Kay Letorneau case adds another discomfiting layer.
There’s a trio of brilliant performances here, but Charles Melton, best known for appearing on the teen soap Riverdale, is the real find as a man who had avoided analyzing his own life until someone else did it for him.
The final 15 minutes of May December are a whirlwind: weird, wicked, twisty, devious, inscrutable, with a brilliant punchline. And yet at the center of it all is a hemorrhaging wound in the form of Joe, an abused boy who never got to grow up. He’s off in his own story, oblivious to the fact that he’s become a bargaining chip between two women who behave like children themselves. It’s a deeply unsettling, darkly funny and incredibly sad movie, and one I can’t stop thinking about.
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Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM here on KPBX.
