Review: May December

By John Corrado

★★★ (out of 4)

The title of director Todd Haynes’s new elevated melodrama May December refers to the extreme age gap between Gracie Atherton (Julianne Moore) and her husband Joe Yoo (Charles Melton).

Their relationship began when he was twelve and she was 36, and sent her to jail for years amid a flurry of media attention. Haynes’s film is set twenty years after this initial crime (the sordid details are mostly revealed through an early montage showing tabloid headlines), when actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) is studying to play Gracie in a movie.

The screenplay by Samy Burch (which was loosely inspired by the real life case of sex offender Mary Kay Letourneau) uses this angle to explore the taboo material from multiple perspectives. In order to portray Gracie in the most authentic way possible, Elizabeth starts to worm her way into their lives.

She embeds herself with the couple at their home in Georgia, where Gracie and Joe now live together with their teenaged twins, who were born amidst the scandal, and are now getting ready to go off to college. At this point, the film becomes as much about the extremes of method acting as much as it is about relitigating this creepy and objectively inappropriate relationship.

This is inherently soapy material, but it’s elevated by very strong performances that keep the film both intriguing and often strangely entertaining to watch. Without such a talented cast, the film may have felt overly tawdry or completely fallen apart, but the central trio of Portman, Moore and Melton all bring interesting layers of depth to their complicated characters.

Through a series of subtle and overt acting choices, Moore uses her unique talents to portray a troubled character who oscillates between disturbing and pathetic. She plays Gracie as an emotionally stunted housewife perpetually trying to appear younger than she is, who can also turn on a dime to become icy and cold. Like the lisp that becomes more apparent when she is under stress, the character has a dark, manipulative side that emerges when she is challenged. She tries to paint herself as the real victim, and in some twisted way seems to actually believe this, constantly begging for sympathetic attention.

Portman’s character keeps her cards a little closer to her chest, with Elizabeth’s cunning machinations hidden behind her demure, movie star demeanour. For his part, Melton has the difficult challenge of portraying a character slowly realizing how he was – and continues to be – victimized (the caterpillars that his character raises into butterflies serve as their own metaphor), and he is able to impressively hold his own alongside these veteran actresses.

The film is set to a purposefully over-dramatic score by Brazilian composter Marcelo Zarvos, offering thunderous crescendos to even the most ridiculous lines of dialogue, like Moore bemoaning the lack of enough hot dogs for a family barbecue. The result is a film that skirts the line between seriousness and camp, a balance that Haynes does a good job of walking without tipping the balance. It’s an interesting experience that, like its characters, is hard to completely to pin down. Haynes offers something more sordid and challenging than the pretty surfaces of Christopher Blauvelt’s cinematography might suggest, including some fascinating uses of mirrors.