'May December' review: An actress' notes on a scandal
Todd Haynes brings a thorny melodrama to vivid, captivating life
May December has the single most absorbing shot I’ve seen in a new film so far this year.
In it, two women - one an actress named Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), the other Gracie (Julianne Moore), who is the subject of Elizabeth’s next movie - sit in a heavily mirrored department store while Gracie’s daughter Mary (Elizabeth Yu) shops for a dress.
One of the mirrors is positioned so that both Gracie and her reflection are sitting on opposite sides of Elizabeth. Another mirror frames the dressing room so that we can see Mary wander in and out of frame, and still another one is positioned between Gracie and Elizabeth so that we can sometimes see Mary’s face. The scene is blocked so that when her daughter obstructs one image of Gracie, we can still see her or her reflection.
Now, I know what some of you are probably thinking. Mirrors, in a movie focused on performance and the fluidity of identity? Groundbreaking.
Done in a lesser film by a less confident filmmaker I’d probably agree with you, but this is a stunning piece of composition and blocking- beautiful, showy, and yet absolutely practical. After I saw it, it became impossible to think of doing the scene any other way.
In other words, this is a Todd Haynes movie.
That means it will also come as no surprise to fellow Haynes Heads that May December is a spell-binding, slippery, and winkingly hilarious deconstruction of the classic melodrama. Its seemingly normal Southern suburbia hides destructive secrets and emotions that erupt like a volcano, not unlike Marcelo Zarvos’ relentless piano-driven score does throughout. (His score, according to Vulture, is a reworking of music used in the 1971 film The Go-Between).
The movie that Elizabeth is set to star in is an indie film that revisits a 20-year-old sex abuse scandal involving Gracie, an older woman who preyed on a middle school boy named Joe. At the time it was tabloid fodder; Gracie’s disgraced face was plastered on magazine covers that were also promoting Billy Crystal’s Oscar-hosting gig. (I said the movie was funny, right?)
Two decades on, the media frenzy has quieted and Gracie and Joe (played as an adult by Charles Melton) are married with three children. Two of them, fraternal twins, are about to graduate high school and head off to college, and the idea of being empty nesters looms over the couple.
Enter Elizabeth. She arrives in Savannah, Georgia, to observe Gracie and Joe, talk to their family, and immerse herself in other research for the movie. It’s going to be a complex portrait, Elizabeth insists, and all she wants is to get at something true.
Portman portrays Elizabeth as a confident disrupter who tries to approach the situation analytically and dispassionately. In her quest for artistic truth, she questions Gracie and Joe as well as Gracie’s first husband, the defense lawyer who represented her, and, in a cringe-inducing exchange, one of her sons from her previous marriage who was also Joe’s best friend.
As she unearths the rotten foundation of Gracie and Joe’s lives, it creates a fissure in the couple’s marriage. Gracie becomes more unstable, and Joe’s repressed feelings about the origin of their relationship surface.
I haven’t been able to shake Moore and Melton’s incredible performances in this film. They are a couple who has settled into an unsettling normalcy; a box full of shit being left on their doorstep is nothing to get upset about. It’s as if neither of them has been asked to revisit the situation before, until now.
Elizabeth’s attempt to be a neutral observer in this situation comes hilariously undone. As she stands as a kind of shadow behind Gracie, notepad in hand, Haynes gradually morphs her into a carbon copy. A bad one.
Suddenly, she’s wearing the bland dresses and aprons that have become her subject’s uniform; she spontaneously says something with a lisp to mime the way Gracie speaks. And she shows an interest in Joe that is much more than research. (It would be a bummer if something like that didn’t happen, in my opinion).
As Haynes and screenwriter Samy Burch took these characters through the maelstrom of melodrama, they disrupted my expectations at every turn. This is not a movie that is reverent of its sometimes heavy subject matter, and all the better for it.
Instead, May December is a movie built on the contradictions and falsehoods at the core of its premise. The charmed, shakily confident version of Gracie that Elizabeth sees during her research will do her no favors in her movie; it’s part of a larger performance that this woman has been giving for decades. We know this because behind closed doors, Haynes and Moore show us the real Gracie; strung out, insecure, and buried in denial.
Some of my favorite films are about the art and method of performance, and the blurring of the fragile line between actor and role, art and reality. While May December isn’t as narratively ambiguous as Persona or Mulholland Dr., it is in a way a sister film.
And it is a welcome addition to that harrowing, magisterial cinematic lineage where two women stare head-on into the camera, which is both a mirror and an abyss.