“May December” (2023) is Todd Haynes latest film set in the spring/summer of 2015 with a famous thirty-six-year-old, engaged actor, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), arriving in Georgia to embed with Gracie (Julianne Moore) and her family to prepare for her role in a tabloid film about Gracie’s notorious 1992 crime. In 1996, the then thirty-six-year-old Gracie slept with her thirteen-year-old coworker, Joe Yoo (Charles Melton). After being convicted as a sex offender, Gracie had Joe’s children and is still married to Joe, a thirty-six-year-old doting father who works with x-rays at a hospital and is a butterfly preservationist. Gracie resents the intrusion but puts on her game face as Elizabeth invades every corner of her life and stirs back up the past controversy. The film begins to shift from Elizabeth’s prurient interest in Gracie’s past to examining Elizabeth’s amoral character. Joe and his children are real people stuck in the middle of Gracie and Elizabeth’s mental tug of war. The now decesased Mary Kay Letourneau and her surviving spouse Vili Fualaau, a Samoan American, inspired the movie.
“May December” is the kind of movie that may attract a lot of viewers for a diverse number of reasons. People fascinated with Letourneau’s case may want to revisit that time in hopes to get their tabloid fix and pretend as if the film is sharing some insight into the case hitherto fore never covered. Portman’s fans may see Elizabeth as an unofficial reprise of her role as an obsessive performer in “Black Swan” (2010), but instead of a person sacrificing herself, including her sanity, for her craft, Elizabeth is making deliberate choices and could never plead insanity. She is all intent and manipulation. “Far from Heaven” (2002) fans who adore the collaboration between Julianne Moore and director Todd Haynes will be eager for a reunion over another period film. Individually Moore and Haynes have enough devotees to make the number of viewings increase precipitously. I was attracted to the preview which suggested some twisted mind games between Elizabeth and Gracie and a titanic pairing of Moore and Portman.
I did not anticipate how Haynes would use the melodramatic soundtrack to highlight the ridiculous heightened emotion and mine humor out of the absurd self-seriousness that Elizabeth and Gracie treat their situation. The first time that it happens within the narrative of “May December,” Gracie opens the refrigerator door as the soundtrack cranks up. “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs.” Cut to an above, looking down shot of the grill showing that there are more than enough hot dogs. These women are dramatic and overblown over a simple situation. Gracie is a controlling person who wanted to bed a baby so she could dominate him like one of their children and create the life that she wanted. Gracie and Joe’s first scene is shared with one of Gracie’s friends and feels as if the middle-aged women are instructing one of their teen sons, not one of the husbands, on his chores for the day. He is taciturn like a teen, but obedient.
Elizabeth is a more interesting character. Haynes shoots her from afar, constantly eluding the camera’s focus, veiled in shadows. As she becomes more visible, she morphs into whatever sympathetic character is needed depending on her audience: Gracie’s ex-husband, Gracie and Joe, the kids. Once she acquires what she wants, she reveals her true self, stops hiding, expresses her desires and exhibits a colder, mechanical side. There is an insightful scene where she closes her conversation with her fiancé on speaker phone with “Love you. Bye,” but her face projects impatience and her eagerness to do the next thing.
“May December” should have been the leading ladies’ film. The title refers not only to the May December romance between Gracie and Joe, but Gracie and Elizabeth at different seasons in their life and subconsciously evokes a “who is the fairest of them all” question. In real life, Letourneau died of cancer so there is an unspoken expectation that Gracie will die soon and is in the winter of her life. Meanwhile Elizabeth is in the spring of her life, the height of her powers, all the fame and desirability that Gracie could never have. As a pair, the dynamic between the two women falls short of expectations.
The scenes in which Gracie and Elizabeth toy with each other never steadily mount in tension as a proper transition to the denouement when Gracie leaves Elizabeth shaken during their last encounter. Gracie is a more inscrutable character to outsiders. No one witnesses Gracie’s early morning, solitary walk with the dogs before graduation which feels pregnant with the possibility of introspection or verging on revealing herself to others. Despite Elizabeth’s excessive attempts to become Gracie, she swings and misses. There are private moments that Elizabeth will never know so Elizabeth can never achieve her goal.
Instead Melton comes out of nowhere and hints that a better movie would have focused on Joe. Melton adds a complex pathos to Joe, who claims not to be a victim, but is alone at sea with no safe person to process his emotions over his predicament. Someone unfamiliar with his story would dismiss him as another pathetic, early mid-life crisis, henpecked husband with a wandering eye a la “American Beauty” (1999). “Leaving Neverland” (2019) introduced the psychological phenomenon that victims of abuse experience to broader audiences. Survivors of childhood abuse do not realize how bad it was until they have a child and realize how young they were when their abusers traumatized them. In a scene with his son, Joe reveals that all he does is worry about his son then cries in his arms. Joe has bought Gracie’s narrative and is only beginning to question her spin on her bad romance. While he seems to have fooled himself into buying Grace’s cover story, he is still a man who is staying in the marriage so his kids have him around until they can escape and have the life and experiences that he missed. His kids are like the monarch butterflies that he protects. He is not allowed to have any needs, and other than his kids, there is not anyone in his life who does not use him to achieve their own personal happiness at his expense without pushing him away. He is the most hopeless character in “May December.”
People of color have a long history of others considering them incapable of being victims of sexual violence, unrapeable, and stereotyping them as more mature and sexual than their white counterparts. The sexual exploitation of boys of color as more mature and not innocent children is perpetuated with Joe through the entire community’s tacit acceptance of pedophilia. Gracie perpetuates the stereotypes by framing Joe as the seducer, the one with more sexual experience and Gracie as the innocent victim. Paging D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” (1915). If Joe, who is Korean, was black, these mature for his age stereotypes would lead to the added threat of his extrajudicial execution.
The family dynamic also implies an unspoken exploitation of people of color. The community accepts Joe while his father remains on the outskirts of their community. Life with Gracie gives Joe and his children more opportunities than he would otherwise have. “May December” gives glimpses of the children’s life with Gracie and without Joe. When Gracie shares childhood stories with Elizabeth as if they are cute snapshots of the past but are horrifying tales of toxic relationship dynamics, later scenes show how the unreflective Gracie perpetuates that abuse with her daughters and murders her younger daughter’s spirit while shopping for dresses. It is a violent scene that could happen with any problematic mother and daughter relationship but has added texture of microaggression since Gracie suffers from believing that she should be the main character, the paragon of beauty, not her daughters, as TikTok creator @teachthemkindness’ January 17, 2023 post elaborates on signs of “suppression model of prejudice.” The film does not devote a lot of time to Gracie’s relationship with the children from her first marriage, but they seem less plagued with conflict and tension other than with her son Georgie (Cory Michael Smith), a reprobate, scene chewing bum. I kind of love that after fifty minutes, the only authentic reaction to the whole affair comes from the person who positions himself as the worst person in any room.
One quibble: who is Rhonda (Andrea Frankie). Did I miss something? I don’t think that the film ever reveals her relationship to the family or why she is in the inner circle. I’m assuming that she is Gracie’s friend but I needed more or to cut her completely out.
While “May December” may not live up to the doppelganger tension eluded to in the previews, it delivers in unexpected ways that will haunt viewers long after the film is finished. Fulfillment established on the back of someone else’s will never satisfy.