Cannes: Netflix Takes Todd Haynes’ ‘May December,’ Starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore

Netflix has acquired Todd Haynes’ Cannes Film Festival competition entry May December, which made an impression on the Croisette, earning a six-minute standing ovation during its Saturday evening premiere.

The film stars Natalie Portman as a Hollywood actress who travels to Georgia to research the life of Gracie (Julianne Moore, teaming with Haynes for the fourth time), who became tabloid fodder after she started a May-December relationship with Joe (Charles Melton), a man 23 years her junior. While preparing for the film about the couple’s past, Elizabeth observes Gracie and Joe’s marriage 20 years after their relationship was national news, a time when they are about to become empty nesters.

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The Hollywood Reporter‘s review called May December “a complex drama that’s intrinsically intimate and yet also detached, at times almost clinical.”

Haynes told THR that the screenplay for the movie came to him “from Natalie and her producing team” during the COVID pandemic. “Rarely do you get scripts that feature such compelling female characters at their center,” he said.

The logline reads: “Twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, a married couple buckles under the pressure when an actress arrives to do research for a film about their past.”

The film, which has been sold in the U.S. by CAA Media Finance and UTA Independent Film Group, was written by Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik, with a producing team that includes Killer Films’ Christine Vachon and Will Ferrell.

Lee Broda, Alex Brown, Samy Burch, Madeleine Rudin Johnson, Jonathan Montepare, Jeff Rice, Thomas K Richards and Thorsten Schumacher executive produce. And, along with Vachon and Ferrell, producers include Jessica Elbaum, Grant S. Johnson, Pamela Koffler, Tyler W. Konney, Sophie Mas and Portman.

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