Most cinematic retellings of true stories traffic in impersonation. And we, as a culture, reward that. Praise isn’t necessarily heaped on an actor for the soulfulness and honesty of their performance, but for how closely they arrive at an approximation of what we perceive to be real. Think about how so many of the most recent winners of acting Oscars underwent impressive physical transformations— face, voice, mannerisms— that are so tightly wound about the image we hold in our collective consciousness about the real life people they are embodying that it becomes simple to look past the fact that so much of what lies under their surface is hollow: Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland in Judy, Jessica Chastain as Tammy Faye Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, to name a few.
Director Todd Haynes’ latest film, May December, is also, at least loosely, based on a true story: the ripped-from-the-tabloids tale of Mary Kay Letourneau, a 34-year-old teacher who in 1996 was arrested for having a sexual relationship with a 12-year-old boy, Vili Fualaau. Letourneau gave birth to two of Fualaau’s children while serving time behind bars, and after her sentence was complete, she and Fualaau (then 21) married and remained together until they separated in 2019 (Letourneau passed away from cancer the following year). In May December, Julianne Moore’s Gracie Atherton-Yoo is the Letourneau stand-in. Back in 1992 she was caught having sex with then-13-year-old Joe Yoo in the back room of the pet store where they both worked and served a lengthy stint in prison during which she gave birth to their daughter, Honor. Twenty-three years later, she and Joe (Charles Melton) are married, with two more kids, twins, who are getting ready to graduate high school and head off to college. The pair are now respected members of their community (although they still get the occasional package of shit delivered to their door), none of who seem ready or willing to reopen past wounds.
May December is no straight adaptation, a true story brought straight from life to the big screen; far from it. Rather, Haynes and screenwriter Samy Burch harness that to create something much richer, to explore those aforementioned concepts of impersonation and performance by introducing into the fold an actress, Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), who has arrived at Gracie and Joe’s Savannah, Georgia home to study Gracie so she can play her in an upcoming movie about her life. It’s just one of the many ideas Haynes’ hangs on the towering scaffolding that comprises May December, whose myriad layers demand revisits (and deeper considerations, which unfortunately the majority of viewers who stumble across this movie on Netflix likely won’t engage with). What’s funny about Elizabeth is that from the jump we get the sense that she isn’t an especially good actress (one of Joe’s neighbors comments on some weird-sounding fantasy movie she was in, which he only knows about because he googled “Elizabeth Berry naked,” she’s apparently best known for playing a vet on a soapy cable drama, and audio we hear of her accepting an award sounds more akin to the shallow ritual that is something like the People’s Choice Awards or the MTV Movie Awards than the hallowed Oscars). If her pursuit of “something real” seems almost unnervingly urgent, if her astute observations of Gracie’s mannerisms and make-up routine and dogged questioning of Gracie’s family and acquaintances appear closer to an investigation than a research trip, it’s because Elizabeth is a husk. For once, it’s appropriate that we get little sense of her life or her personality beyond this; her entire being is wrapped up in becoming others.
The concept of doubles plays into this too, to an extent. Haynes is clearly influenced by Persona (the famous poster for Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 psychological drama that places the faces of stars Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann side-by-side is mirrored in the poster for May December, in which Portman and Moore almost appear to be merging into each other) and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, films in which the lead character begins to become unable to distinguish herself from her counterpart. Haynes, always careful about the composition of each frame and the placement of the actors within it, frequently shows Elizabeth mimicking Gracie. A hilarious scene set in a department store dressing room (this is, to be clear, quite a funny movie, with humor generated from the friction of the uncomfortableness of both Gracie and Joe’s past and the introduction of an outsider into their innermost lives) in which Gracie and Elizabeth watch Gracie’s daughter Mary (Elizabeth Yu) try on dresses for graduation sees the pair sitting side by side, their image doubled by the mirrors surrounding them (in almost every one of the scenes they share, Elizabeth and Gracie are seen either looking straight into a mirror, or have a mirror placed behind them, visually communicating the ways they reflect each other), Elizabeth brushing at her hair and shifting her body as Gracie performs those same actions. But Elizabeth attempts to get closer to Gracie ways that are far more unsettling as well. She visits the pet shop where Gracie and Joe were caught and simulates the sex act in the stock room alone. She shamelessly voices her attraction to Joe (who is, at this point, about the same age as she is) and, when reviewing audition tapes for the young actor who is to play teenage Joe in the movie, opines that they “should be sexier” (again, talking about 13-year-olds).
None of this works— or at least, is significantly less effective— without the committed and delectable performances two of Hollywood’s greatest actresses. Portman has never been better; if everything she’s doing leading up to it isn’t evidence, then a staggering third-act monologue in which she is acting as Gracie most certainly is. Moore has, by comparison, the less showy role of the two, but she is equally as potent, and while it’s established pretty early on that Gracie has a personality disorder— it’s deeply disturbing to see the way she flips the blame for the way their relationship started on Joe— it’s still just as delicious to see how she turns the tables on Elizabeth.
These performances (Portman’s affected faux sweetness in particular), the sensational aspect of the story, and the highly dramatic, occasionally discordant piano score (by Marcelo Zarvos, but a re-orchestration of Michael Legrand’s music from Joseph Losey’s 1971 period drama The Go–Between, who is co-credited on this film) have prompted many critics and audiences, straight of out May December’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, to mislabel it as camp. Camp, by definition, is art that emphasizes theatricality over reality. In her ground-breaking 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” which first popularized the term, Susan Sontag defines camp across 58 points, a few of which seem particularly pertinent to how we classify May December. She states that “All Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice,” and that “Camp sees everything in quotation marks…To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” The latter statement doesn’t exactly confirm May December as camp, although “life as theater” is in some respects what May December is about. If anything, Haynes is lobbing critiques at that idea, most notably when Joe takes offense to Elizabeth referring to his life as a “story” in conversation; it all goes back to that line between performance and reality that is nigh-impossible to cross. As to the former statement, well, there’s little artifice to be found in May December, which never tackles its characters or themes with the ironic slant that camp often requires. May December would be more aptly described as a melodrama; like much of Haynes’ previous work, it’s tonally and stylistically in line with the 1950s dramas of Douglas Sirk. May December deals with heightened emotions, and its maneuvering between the art of performance with Elizabeth and Gracie and the much more serious revelations and break-downs Joe experiences as a result of both Elizabeth’s arrival and the last of his children preparing to leave the nest when he is only 36 years old himself is, I suppose, not easy for audiences now whose likely only comp for this sort of movie is a cheap Lifetime Channel Original to grasp on to with any sort of nuance. Melton, while we’re here, often feels like he’s in a different movie from everyone else, but in the best way possible; he conveys the insularity of Joe’s life and the realization that maybe he was too young when he first got together with Gracie in the most wrenching manner. Even Gracie’s crying jag over a canceled cake order is treated with a sensitive touch when in other hands it could easily have been played for laughs. When we talk about how Hollywood doesn’t make movies for adults anymore, we might as well toss the lost art of the melodrama in the pile. To continue to use Sirk as a comparison, his melodramas (both his Technicolor ones and his lesser-recognized but equally as incisive black-and-white ones) frequently utilized sensational situations (the freak accident in Magnificent Obsession, the privileged yet dysfunctional family at the heart of Written on the Wind) to cut to the heart of very deep, very real, feelings of love, longing, and loss that so many mainstream films nowadays seem tentative to wholly embrace. That his movies, along with Haynes’, most often swirled around women, isn’t lost on me. “Women’s pictures,” (a phrase that actually identifies a genre of movies created for women that has existed since the early days of silent cinema but arguably reached its heights in Hollywood in the 1930s and throughout the 1940s with stars like Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck, whose heightened performance styles would often later be classified under the camp umbrella) and later the term “chick flick,” are often used in a derogatory sense. Many people don’t, never did, and likely never will enjoy seeing women’s feelings— their desires, their faults, their vulnerabilities— play out on screen, so they cheapen them, choosing to view them through the lens of comedy or irony so they don’t have to take them seriously. The women in May December and their wants and needs may be more oblique than the women in the films I’m referencing, but they are still the center of the movie’s universe. If the roles were reversed, and Elizabeth and Gracie were men instead, would so many people be referring to May December as camp? It seems unlikely.
Regardless of the lens through which you view it, May December concludes on an absolute knock-out final scene, in which a glimpse of the actual movie about Gracie that Elizabeth is making appears to be more tawdry than natural, every repetition of the shot pulling farther and farther away from the real thing. Haynes brings the point home: no matter how studied a performance is, how correctly every surface-level detail is calibrated, it’s always clawing at the heart of the real thing, but never truly piercing its center.
May December is now playing in theaters and streaming on Netflix. Runtime: 117 minutes. Rated R.
Katie at the Movies 