‘May December’: Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore’s Twisted Tabloid Scandal

Very early on in Todd Haynes‘ May December, Julianne Moore is prepping for a BBQ. Her character, Gracie, is a suburban mom in Savannah, Georgia, idly chatting to a neighbor in a spacious, tastefully decorated kitchen. Her husband wanders through, grabbing a beer before going back outside to man the grill. Their kids and several friends are running around in the backyard. Gracie has just mentioned that a visitor is expected soon when she walks over to the refrigerator. As the light from the open fridge door illuminates her in profile, the music begins to rise. You can feel a sense of heightened tension suddenly building with each struck piano key. And then Moore declares, with the gravest sense of dread: “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs.”

It’s hard not to crack up at everything about this moment: the dead-serious line reading, the Days of Our Lives big-revelation vibe, the straight-outta-Dimitri-Tiomkin’s-playbook score, the low stakes elevated to high melodrama. You could not be blamed for thinking that Haynes’ tongue is resting comfortably in his cheek as he maneuvers his lead actor and muse — this is the duo’s fifth collaboration — into perilous middle-class rapids. And because we’re talking about a world-class filmmaker who mined pathos out of Barbie dolls before it was fashionable and has long understood the dual meanings of Douglas Sirk-level distress, there’s a temptation to think you’ve just entered a world brimming with winks and nudges.

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Yet ever since the film’s premiere at Cannes this past spring, Haynes has bristled whenever the word “camp” was invoked, and it’s only after you see May December that you truly understand why. It’s not that Gracie’s life is so provincial that a potential lack of weiners is a deathblow. The reality is that she’s already endured so much world-shattering drama that a frankfurter drought is now the most she can possibly handle.

Because once upon a time, Gracie was a married 36-year-old mother who worked at a pet store. Her future husband, Joe (Charles Melton), was her coworker with whom she had an affair… when he was 13 years old. They were caught, she was sent to prison, and while incarcerated, had his baby. After serving her time, Gracie and Joe married, and added a set of twins to the family. (Any similarities between this older woman and, say, Mary Kay Letourneau are not coincidental.) The tabloids had a field day, and it took decades for the couple to live down the infamy. Now, Gracie spends her days selling her baked goods, Joe tends to what may be the most highly symbolic collection of monarch butterfly larvae ever, and the occasional box of dog shit on the porch notwithstanding, the community couldn’t be more welcoming.

The past is the past is the past, until a TV star named Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) comes to town. She’s playing Gracie in an upcoming movie and has asked to shadow her. For some reason — Vanity? Politeness? A need to try and reclaim her own narrative? — Gracie agrees to let this actor observe their lives. Invade would be a more accurate verb. Lines get blurred, boundaries are tiptoed over before being outright trampled, and what might have started as something mutually beneficial begins to feel more one-sided and parasitic. There will be mirrors, and doubling, and tears, because hiring Julianne Moore to play a woman on the verge and not having this extraordinary screen crier turn on the waterworks is practically akin to a war crime.

There are essentially three ways to tell this story: an exploitative tale ripped from yesterday’s yellow-journalism headlines, revisited; a tsk-tsk commentary on turning such true-story tragedies into car-wreck entertainment; and a wild, take-no-prisoners tale reveling in sex, sin and side-eyes. (See: that earlier mention of camp.) Haynes somehow finds a fourth way, in which sincerity, an actual emotional resonance, and a curiosity about performance — what it hides and how it reveals — rule the roost. It’s a genius move which not only favors the actors but flatters the sensibilities of viewers as well. Yes, we know you don’t want to look away from a sensationalist story of tawdry, transgressive “love” and its aftermath, the movie tells us. But don’t you wonder, like we do, what happens when you treat these figures like complicated human beings instead of caricatures?

Haynes has always been one of the few American filmmakers who’s willing, much less able to layer such stories in a way that feels offbeat and realistic, curious and knowing. Here, he’s taken a script by Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik about a vintage tabloid scandal and, along with his 100-percent on-point cast, turned it into a three-way character study that’s a ticking time bomb. We’ve become accustomed to Julianne Moore scraping herself raw and treading into volatile territory when it comes to complicated women, especially with Haynes by her side (let us now praise Safe and Far From Heaven). Yet she outdoes herself here, from knowing when to let Gracie’s outbursts do the real talking to employing a Letourneau-like lisp that gets more pronounced the more stressed she gets.

As for Natalie Portman, she hasn’t had a role this rich or this well-suited to her talents since Jackie, or maybe Black Swan; she nails an ambitious actors’ narcissism, and the almost predatory way that Elizabeth keeps sucking the marrow out of real pain to get into character. It’s a portrait of a performer as part Method monster and part serial-killer profiler. Even the way she blithely says, “Thank you, that means the world to me” when a stranger compliments her work speaks volumes.

There’s a third part of May December‘s triangle, however, that anchors Haynes’ vision of the collateral damage of past indiscretions, and this is where that time bomb concept — and Charles Melton — come in. The Riverdale actor initially gives us a dude accustomed to still being talked to and treated like a tween by his older wife; he’s a restless case of arrested development, a man-child somehow experiencing a mid-life crisis in his mid-thirties. (We meet Joe at the same age Gracie was when, per her words, she was “seduced” by him.)

We’re so busy tuning in to Moore and Portman’s clash of the titans that it takes us a second to register how unearthing the couple’s conveniently smoothed-over history might be unmooring something in him. Melton plays this man’s gradual awakening to how he’s been at the mercy of things he still can’t reckon with in the most delicate, heartbreaking way that when the bomb goes off, you realize the damage has remained long after the flashbulbs stopped. Moore and Portman inject the movie with wattage, dramatic heft, and a push-pull dynamic associated with immovable objects and irresistible forces. Melton gives May December its slow-burn tragedy. It’s why the film wounds the way it does.

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