Review: May December (2023)
A manipulative actress invades the lives of a tabloid-infamous couple
May December (2023)
Directed by Todd Haynes
Written by Samy Burch
In the excellent new film by Todd Haynes (“Dark Waters,” “Carol,” “Far from Heaven,” “Velvet Goldmine”), a famous young actress visits a tabloid-infamous child rapist 25 years after the crime, in the home she shares with her husband/victim and their children. Her intention is to ask questions about the crime and understand the rapist’s mentality, and she gets more than she asks for, and a lot of strangeness she doesn’t see coming.
Based in part on the life of Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who raped her 12-year-old student in 1997 and died in 2015, this is at first glance a a true-crime-ish thriller — removed a certain distance by fictionalizing the people involved — and Oscar bait for both Natalie Portman, who plays the actress, and Julianne Moore, who plays her subject.
But it goes far beyond re-enacting the Letourneau story, or rather its aftermath, the movie also interrogates the relationship between artists and their subjects — this aspect of the film, to me, was even more interesting than the true-crime aspect. And it’s an extremely well-scripted display of how to take a story that might have familiar aspects for some viewers and slowly reveal its background in a way that’s creepy and thrilling whether you know the original story, or anything about the film.
In fact, I think it’s actually better for viewers if they go in knowing nothing about the real-life story or even what, in particular, the film is about. If you watch the movie under the mistaken impression, based on the film’s poster, that the title refers to the differences in the ages of Portman’s character Elizabeth and her subject, Gracie, that would be fine. Because much of the pleasure of watching the film derives from the way director Todd Haynes and screenwriter Samy Burch use the device of the actress -interviewer to reveal the backstory to viewers while simultaneously revealing the parallels between Elizabeth and Gracie — more about that later.
The movie’s backstory: Twenty-five years ago, Gracie (then 36) seduced, or rather, raped, Joe (then 13) in the back room of a pet shop in which they both worked. After their relationship is discovered, Gracie keeps her hooks in her young victim during her imprisonment, and upon her release — already having borne him three children — she marries the boy, by this time 20, and they attempt to live happily ever after. The film takes place 16 years after that, as their younger children are set to graduate from high school.
When Elizabeth arrives at the large waterfront house of Gracie and her husband Joe, the family welcomes and makes room for her. (The film is set in Savannah, Ga., perhaps to leverage that city’s reputation as being weird or haunted, to make the film more creepy than it already is — and that’s plenty.) They allow her to shadow them at their work or hobbies for several days, because they hope that gaining Elizabeth’s sympathy and understanding will make their portrayal in the film more sympathetic.
Many of the people Elizabeth talks with are impressed to meet a celebrity, and she obviously has no compunctions about leveraging her status to disarm interviewees and penetrate their defenses. Crucially, her lack of ethical boundaries rivals that of her subject, Gracie. She will do or say anything to get the family and other locals to grant her access to their memories and to the scene of the initial crime. At the pet store where Gracie and Joe met, she talks with the owner — the same guy whose family owned the place when the infamous events took place — then asks to see the stockroom where Gracie raped Joe. Alone there, she chooses a spot where the rape might have occurred, and proceeds to mime the experience of having sex, the better to inhabit her character.
All in service to the Work, as a Method actor might say. It’s not the only way she attempts to put herself in Gracie’s shoes — and in her mind, her voice, and every other part of her life that she can access. She wants, as she explains it, “to find something true” that she can base her portrayal on.
Of course, this cuts both ways. Gracie, like the real-life person who inspires the character, has a self-serving view of the events that she wishes Elizabeth’s film will adopt.1 Some of the other characters are realists when they tell the story. Gracie’s former lawyer tells Elizabeth that when he first met his client, she was unaware that what she had done was wrong, much less a crime. “When did it sink in?” Elizabeth asks. “Has it ever?” the lawyer replies.
The longer Elizabeth stays in Savannah — longer than planned, we learn during a phone call with the director of the film she’s preparing for, a scene which also tells us she is blithely manipulating him as well as Gracie’s husband Joe (Charles Melton, in what should be a breakout role) — the more lines she crosses. Georgie, one of Gracie’s many children from her first marriage, and one of the characters who has suffered the most psychic damage, recognizes her lack of ethical compunction and tries to turn the tables and manipulate her. But it’s hard to manipulate a fellow narcissist. The scene where he attempts to leverage his cooperation “and consultation” into a job in Hollywood is equally comic and pathetic.
The film’s climax comes not in a scene between the two primary characters, nor in one which marks the height of the actress’s Method-inspired attempts to plumb Gracie’s experience through intimacy with Joe, but in a solo monologue delivered by Elizabeth directly to the camera. She recites, from memory, a love letter from Gracie to Joe written soon after Gracie’s initial crime. He’s given this letter to Elizabeth because he’s fallen for her manipulative tactics and wants her to truly understand what happened 25 years ago. As she speaks the words of Gracie’s letter — already committed to memory — she uses everything she’s absorbed from her time with the woman. Her voice has become Gracie’s, she exhibits Gracie’s tics and facial expressions. It’s a truly epic own, and the creepiest moment in a very creepy film.
But this merely points to Julianne Moore’s own superb performance. I don’t know whether she has captured the voice and facial expressions of the real Letourneau, or built every aspect of the character on her own. It doesn’t matter, because Moore is so wholly Gracie, so fearless in showing her character’s controlling behavior, her utterly bourgeois middle-class vocal inflections, her naïveté and her rage.
Her ugly-crying is epic. So are her undermining comments to her daughters. In a scene all too familiar to women whose families or friends undermine them while pretending to compliment them, Gracie and her daughter Mary (Elizabeth Yu in a tiny role but a great performance) go shopping for a dress the girl can wear to graduation. She comes out of the dressing room in a sleeveless frock she clearly loves.
Gracie: “Oh, Mary, I want to commend you for being so brave and showing your arms like that. It’s something I wished I could do when I was your age — just not care about these unrealistic beauty standards.”
In a few seconds, Yu’s face beautifully and wordlessly conveys her hurt feelings, then her anger. Then, less than a second later, she composes her face into a false smile as she invents an excuse (“too much like what Molly is wearing”) and stomps back to the dressing room. As for the dress, it’s never seen again.
The multi-layered script by Samy Burch is brilliant in small but penetrating moments like this one. In a much more emotionally fraught scene late in the movie, Gracie and Joe argue, apparently for the first time, about whether he may actually have been too young at age 13 to be able to make a responsible decision about what she still calls “having an affair” with him. The scene, which shows she is still utterly unable to see that what she did was wrong, ends with her pathetic line, seemingly out of nowhere: “It’s graduation!” For Gracie, all that matters at the moment is that her victim-husband threatens to interrupt her well-constructed bourgeois fantasy.
I haven’t even had the chance to comment on how good Charles Melton is as Joe. Not only does he display the right mixture of good dad and stuck-in-unresolved-trauma child, but his beauty and physicality (sadly not captured in any of the production stills I have found) make him an extremely believable character.
Despite its release on Netflix rather than in theaters2, this film marks a high point in the career of director Todd Haynes after the disappointing melodrama “Carol” (2015) and his most recent film, the pandemic-era documentary “The Velvet Underground” (2021). There are only two false notes: the dramatic music is a little too dramatic, especially early in the film; and the final scene between Gracie and Elizabeth leaves Elizabeth strangely stupified in a way I thought was not justified by the dialogue. Everything else in this highly controlled and well-performed film works together to reward the viewer’s investment.
In New York and Los Angeles-area theaters; otherwise, on Netflix.
Of particular note is her assertion — taken directly from something Letourneau said in a 2018 interview — that it was the victim who seduced her, not the other way around, and that the 12-year-old victim was “the boss back then”:
During the Sunday Night interview, Letourneau jumped on the defence again when pressured by [an interviewer] to admit she “should have known better”… Letourneau turned to her husband and repeatedly asked him “who was the boss, who was the boss back then,” saying that he had pursued her.
“Mary Kay Letourneau defends rape of her 12-year-old student, now husband” — news.au.com, Sep. 24, 2018
Except in New York and L.A.