Todd Haynes Twists the Knife With His Sizzling, Uncomfortable May December: Review
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The post Todd Haynes Twists the Knife With His Sizzling, Uncomfortable May December: Review appeared first on Consequence.
This review is part of our coverage of the 2023 New York Film Festival.
The Pitch: Never let it be said that beloved TV and film actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) doesn’t bury herself in the part. For her latest role, Berry travels to Georgia to spend some time researching Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), who became a tabloid sensation in the 1990s when the then-married thirtysomething slept, Mary Kay Letourneau-like, with a 13-year-old stockboy named Joe Yoo (Charles Melton). She went to jail, had her first of three kids with him, and married him when she got out.
Now, they live a happy life of domesticity, or so it seems at least; they move around a lot, and still get mailed the occasional box of feces, but their lives are so overshadowed by scandal that it seems quaint to them. Besides, they’ve got more important things to worry about, like their oldest’s impending high school graduation.
But the more Elizabeth spends time with them, the more she peels back the layers of their scandal: the previous family Gracie’s indiscretion tore apart, the glimmers of discord in her current marriage, and so much more. Moreover, the mirror begins to stare back at her as her time with Gracie and Joe tests her own moral limits.
Boys Are Hard! At first blush, May December seems sedate, almost bucolic: its characters are gentle, and scenes play out with smiling Southern hospitality. But director Todd Haynes quickly turns up the tonal dial, twisting you from contemplative character study to something approaching camp in the blink of an eye.
Moore’s Gracie is all smiles and welcoming words for Elizabeth when she arrives, a Very Nice Lady who toils away at her pineapple upside-down cakes and keeps to the business of motherhood. Then, Haynes will zoom in on her face staring into the fridge as melodramatic strings sear across the soundscape like a giallo film (the score, by Marcelo Zavros, rearranges and reorchestrates a Michel Legrand score from 1971’s The Go-Between) and she mutters, “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs.”
May December (Netflix)
It’s a funny and deeply uncomfortable moment — not the last time May December will dig into those contrasting impulses. That element can be found throughout every thread of Haynes’ complicated tapestry: Moore’s Gracie is a controlling tyrant at crucial moments, throwing out passive-aggressive jabs about her daughter’s fashion choices (“You know, I think it’s so great how unafraid you are to show your arms like that”) or using a canceled cake order to direct her husband’s attention towards her. Moore arms Gracie with a powerful ability to live in her own little reality, which she asserts through her subtle lisp.
This Is Just What Grownups Do: As for Portman, she’s deep in Black Swan mode again here, playing a character who searches a little too deeply for herself in her next role. Her investigation of Gracie and Joe’s controversial life story seems a bit intense, spending so much time with the family you feel the clan start to grow sick of her by the end. But she relishes the chance to dig into such a messed-up dynamic, the act of studying Gracie itself a delicious transgression for her. She mimics what it would be like to be Gracie (who was Elizabeth’s age when she started her affair with Joe) in the pet store stockroom where they were initially caught; a lurid question from a classmate at Gracie’s daughter’s school kicks off a monologue about doing onscreen sex scenes in which she describes that loss of boundary between you and your partner.
It’s that fuzzy violation of boundaries that fuels so much of Haynes’ (and the cast’s) best work here: Elizabeth’s insinuation into Gracie and Joe’s lives grows borderline pathological, so Gracie’s increased discomfort at it tracks. But what is Gracie so worried about? That Elizabeth will portray her inaccurately? Or that she’ll dig too deeply into who she really is?
As for Elizabeth, the bone-deep immersion she’s so dedicated to achieving entices her to crack fissures in the family firmament — whether prying old wounds in Gracie’s old clan (including Cory Michael Smith as a particularly volatile member of Gracie’s first set of kids) or taking advantage of Joe’s deep-seated feeling that he may, in fact, have never been allowed to grow up. (Melton is fantastic here, standing easily alongside Moore and Portman as a lost boy who feels more like an older sibling than a father to his children.)
The Verdict: Todd Haynes’ films often feel like a sharp fingernail digging at the frazzled corners of our personal and interpersonal lives to see what truth lies underneath. Isolation, yearning, and transgression are hallmarks of his works, whether they be Carol, Far From Heaven, or Safe; his characters push and prod against the rules and codes of polite society, asking you to question how you’re supposed to feel about the lines his protagonists cross. May December is no different, and it may be one of his most assured. It’s a master class in discomfort.
Where to Watch: May December will have a limited theatrical release on November 17th, and is streaming now on Netflix.
Trailer:
Todd Haynes Twists the Knife With His Sizzling, Uncomfortable May December: Review
Clint Worthington
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