A subtle, powerful, slow burn.
Director Todd Haynes is well known for his subversive characters – Bob Dylan (played by six different actors) in I’m Not There, forbidden lesbian lovers of the 1950s in Carol, and a housewife (again in the 50s) who discovers her husband is gay, thus has an affair with her African-American gardener. He’s as comfortable with the famous fringe-dwellers as he is with the everyday, and with his latest film, May December, it’s a mix of both: the tabloid-made infamous.
Gracie (Julianne Moore) welcomes actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) into her home, which she shares with her husband Joe (Charles Melton) and their last-in-the-nest daughter Mary (Elizabeth Yu). They seem such a happy family living in an idyllic southern American community that you’d be surprised Gracie and Joe’s past began in disgrace two decades earlier when he was thirteen and she was a married woman with children his age. Caught having sex in the storeroom of the pet store where they both worked, Gracie went to prison, where she gave birth to their first child. Elizabeth is soon to play Gracie in a movie.
Haynes’s feature films tend to be heavy on the drama without gimmicks. His pacing is measured and he depends on his actors to carry more weight than the dialogue does. Moore (who also worked with him on Far From Heaven) and Portman follow through. They’re balanced precariously on levels of intimacy and treachery throughout, making the film an uncomfortable one to watch and an impossible one from which to turn away.
That Gracie is deeply flawed is an obvious place to begin, judgmentally, but Elizabeth’s interest in getting her muse right, in seeing Gracie for who she really is beneath the hype, is also questionable. As she tells a group of acting student’s at Mary’s school when asked how she picks her characters, Elizabeth says, ‘It’s the moral grey ones that are interesting.’ This could be Haynes speaking, but it’s also a trigger for the audience to question Elizabeth’s motives. In her portrayal of Gracie, does she want the story or the life? Because it’s clear that even when she’s not acting, she’s acting, so what then is authenticity?
Based on Haynes’s fascination with the true story of Mary Kay Letourneau’s highly publicised relationship with her sixth grade student Vili Fualaau, and with the way these controversial moments embed themselves in our cultural memory, May December is a slow-burn that works with subtle yet powerful symbolism. And not to be forgotten is Marcelo Zarvos’s weighty score at the opening credits, then its recurrence when Gracie says at her daughter’s party, ‘I don’t think we have enough hotdogs.’
Reviewed by Heather Taylor Johnson
May December is currently showing as part of the Adelaide Film Festival.
Click here for screening times, and to book tickets.
