MAY DECEMBER - Mark Reviews Movies

May December, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 16, 2023

One could list the real-life cases that inspired May December, the story of an adult woman who had an affair with a not-yet-teenaged boy, but why give them more publicity? There have been plenty, and all of them have captured the public's attention to one degree or another. Screenwriter Samy Burch and director Todd Haynes' film, then, is as much about the strange appeal these cases possess within the public conscious as it is about the sad and generally awful state of the people involved in them.

This tale, which follows the aftermath of one such illegal relationship more than 20 years after it was discovered, has three main characters. The first is the woman, named Gracie (Julianne Moore), who was attracted to a 12-year-old boy in boy, groomed him, and became pregnant after assorted secret sexual encounters. The second is the boy, now a 36-year-old man named Joe (Charles Melton), who was and remains shy, sheltered, and introverted.

They're married now, with three children—including the one to whom Gracie gave birth while she was in prison for statutory rape. The couple lives in the same town in a rather opulent home, considering the fact that she just makes baked goods for a small collection of her neighbors for money and he doesn't seem to do much of any work, if he even has a job. One imagines selling the rights to their story for a made-for-TV movie must have helped them quite a bit, not to mention whatever other appearances either or both of them must have made over the years.

The premise is that another movie is being made about the two, bringing us to the third character. She's Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), an actor who got the gig to play Gracie in an upcoming independent feature about the affair and, presumably, the fallout of its discovery. Elizabeth arrives in town with the goal of spending time with Gracie, watching her behavior and manner, asking questions of her and her family and people who know or knew her, and coming to some idea about how to convincingly play this woman. She's not here to judge or to criticize, just to observe and to understand to the best of her ability.

This dynamic, between three characters who want something from each other—even if they're not willing to admit what that is outright—and put on various acts to achieve those aims, is fascinating enough. The filmmakers, though, elevate that drama by constantly poking and prodding at their film's existence. No, this isn't directly based on a particular true-life case, but what good does it do to attempt to find some understanding in such a crime? Does the mere act of dramatizing it also romanticize or justify it in some way?

Those are some of the questions raised here, directly by way of the drama that unfolds and subtly in some of the ways Haynes toys with the material on a formal level. Take the film's score by Marcelo Zarvos, which has the undeniable quality of music one might hear on any given daytime soap opera.

It plays under certain scenes, swelling in a melodramatic fashion as these characters move toward potential conflict, but without warning, the music stops before any climax arrives. Whatever expectation we might have from the build-up is shattered, such as in one moment when Joe goes to visit his father (played by Kelvin Han Yee), only for the scene to play out in about as mundanely melancholy a way as possible. Nothing, really, is said between them, and doesn't that say much more about this relationship, as well as its past and continuing effects on Joe, than any pages of dialogue could?

Much about the setup and execution here screams exploitation, but through such formal touches, Haynes makes a concerted effort to actively destroy that notion. Gracie is no tragic figure, no matter how much she has convinced herself that she is, but a quietly controlling and manipulative force on the lives around her—especially when it comes to her husband. She keeps tabs on him, particularly when it comes to his time spent with the also-36-year-old Elizabeth, and casually orders him around at every turn. There are a couple of moments when Gracie refers to both Joe and their teenage son (played by Gabriel Chung) as "boys," and it's chilling each and every time.

The addition of Elizabeth into this mix is an ingenious idea. That's both because it adds a potential layer of performance to Gracie's everyday existence, since she wants the actor to see her as a complex but ultimately sympathetic person, and because it forces us to observe Gracie from the perspective of an actor who wants to analyze, comprehend, and find some relatable connection with this woman.

On a subconscious level, it makes us more active witnesses of what is happening and more curious investigators of what happened a couple decades ago, as Elizabeth questions Gracie's attorney (played by Lawrence Arancio), who has some to accept his former client and Joe's relationship to the extent any wannabe-good neighbor can, and her older son Georgie (Cory Michael Smith), who was understandably traumatized by his mother's crime and the publicity surrounding it. Gracie's ex-husband Tom (D.W. Moffett) appears, too, still unable to figure out why any of it happened and how he's supposed to respond to everything that has happened since.

Elizabeth also, though, becomes a cautionary tale about the very attempt to understand and relate this situation. That's most telling in one scene, when she talks with the movie's director over the phone about what type of child actor should be cast as the young Joe (She doesn't even realize what she's saying until the director stops her).

It's also clear in the way the relationship between her and Joe develops. Of a trio of very fine performances (Moore is insidiously convincing, while Portman exudes a specific kind of intelligence that looks for the nuance but misses the obvious), Melton's work here stands out, as Joe becomes the desolate, broken heart of the tale—a man who never learned to be an adult, because his formative years were stolen from him.

That's an undeniable truth of May December. As for Gracie, the film is hauntingly uncertain, especially in its final two scenes, which suggest either that the truth is too complex to every fully realize or too simple for some to accept as such.

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