May December is a film about the creative process, but not in the ways you might expect. Natalie Portman plays a famous actress who agrees to play a real life woman. That real life woman is played by Julianne Moore. The movie’s poster suggests something between Persona and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, but it also promises a colossal confrontation between two very talented, and very different performers. Portman is a movie star, megawatt famous since she was a child, and an Oscar winner before she turned 30. Moore is a dependable, veteran actress who’s opened Hollywood films as often as she’s headlined independent work. Both actors seem driven by compelling projects and are uninterested in commercial cinema, but where Moore’s approach is holistic, Portman is verbose and impactful. The showdown between them is what brings you into the theater, but May December gives you so much more.
The great director Todd Haynes understands what can happen when you get two actors of this caliber together; that part of what makes May December so fascinating is Portman and Moore’s willingness to do it to begin with. Moore is a former resident of Haynes’s heightened and artificial worlds, but Portman is a newcomer and has rarely done anything like this before. Haynes coaxes a playfulness out of both of them, but particularly Portman. As somebody who has been so famous for so long, one cannot reasonably expect Portman to be anything like a normal person, and May December is basically about how un-normal a famous person can be, whether that fame comes from movie stardom or from unwanted tabloid notoriety.
The film’s script, by Samy Burch, dabbles in the taboo, even if that’s not the story’s main interest. Portman plays Elizabeth Berry, a world famous movie star whose credits vary in respectability. She’s decided to star in a movie about Gracie Atherton, a woman who was imprisoned in the 90’s after having an affair with a seventh grader when she was thirty-six. Decades later, Gracie (Julianne Moore) lives in Savannah. She’s still married to her child lover, Joe (Charles Melton), and they have children who are about to graduate high school. Gracie agrees to have Elizabeth visit and interview them for research. When Elizabeth arrives, she is shocked to find that her and Joe are the same age. After all, she’s only beginning to think about having kids and he already has some graduating. Gracie wants to make sure Elizabeth’s portrayal is fair, but Elizabeth only cares about finding the one thing that can set this character on the right track.
Despite her notorious reputation, Gracie plays the role of the domestic housewife well. She cooks, she bakes, she takes her children to restaurants and clothing stores. Her outward, front-facing demeanor is one of steel resolve, untainted by the crimes of her past, but Elizabeth knows there’s a fragility there, hidden deep inside. She can’t get on the set until she accesses it in some way, experiences it for herself so she can transform it into performance. Gracie and Joe do their best to play humble host, but Elizabeth’s digging inevitably gets personal. She interviews people in the town, including Gracie’s ex-husband Tom (D.W. Moffett) who says he’s fully over it. Gracie’s son with Tom, George (Cory Michael Smith), isn’t quite over it, and is quick to tell Elizabeth that his mother’s affair is the source of all his current undoing.
Elizabeth plays coy, acting seductive and playful with people she hopes to get useful information from. For her, this is not an ethical lapse, but a necessary step to do her job. If Gracie senses Elizabeth’s falseness, then Elizabeth definitely catches on to Gracie’s delusional domestic bliss and her dangerously high level of denial. All the while, Joe is being forced to reconcile his life for the first time in a very long while. This sudden recreation, in the clarity of adulthood, makes certain aspects of his marriage more unsightly than they seemed before. The more Elizabeth creeps, the more the thin facade of Gracie and Joe’s marraige crumbles. As high school graduation approaches, this forbidden love story – and the town that overlooks and enables it – only grows in dark complexity.
At this point, Todd Haynes has been splicing Sirkian melodrama into contemporary narratives for so long that he can basically do it in his sleep. It’s a testament to his insane talent and unending creativity that this never gets old, and that he keeps finding fresh takes on which to project it onto. Burch’s script has a slight resemblance to the 90’s tabloid story of Mary Kay Letourneau, but Burch is less interested in the scandal itself and more in observing how we all digest it. Both Elizabeth and Gracie have degrees of fame, and what does it mean when the movie star of repute leeches off the sex offender? What good is the stigma of being a predator when it leads to a para-social relationship with a celebrity? Burch gets candid with what we in society are willing to accept and what makes a story like this blow up (or in the parlance of our times: go viral).
As great as Burch’s script is, the radioactive subject matter is only palatable with a director who knows how to filter it through the proper cinematic context. Haynes is a scholar of cinema, but he’s also a consumer of the same titillating stories that May December is about. He also knows all about our obsessions with famous women; it’s good enough for us if they’re famous on their own merit, but it’s even better when they’re famous for something untoward. Savannah can sit back and accept Gracie as their town freak show, building her up and breaking her down as they see fit. And Elizabeth knows she can invade this life as much as she wants. After all, she’s famous in a more acceptable way, and Gracie is a social outlier. These mixed emotions get extremely complex, and Haynes’s distillation of all these themes is some of the best work of his career.
Haynes loves a complicated story, sometimes a little too much (I’m Not There is fascinating but keeps you at arm’s length). May December is him working at the proper balance, and it’s also him nuturing three incredible performances. Melton, known mostly for the TV show Riverdale, gives a performance of shocking vulnerability, and almost steals the whole movie. Almost. This is the Portman-Moore show. Moore, working with Haynes for the first time since I’m Not There in 2007, returns and gives a performance of textbook Moore perfection: funny, sexy, and completely unpredictable. In a career of fearless brilliance, Moore continues to challenge herself and the audience, tempting derision and evading it perfectly with the quality of her work. May December is a showcase and a recognition of Moore, one of the finest actors in the medium.
The irony is that Moore’s career is a lot closer to Elizabeth Berry than Portman’s is. It’s part of the genius that Haynes flips the script, making Moore nationally notorious and Portman actorly and removed. I’ll admit to being allergic to most of Natalie Portman’s performances of the last ten years, but Haynes finds the perfect showcase for her ostentatious delivery, playing directly upon her arch approach to performance. It’s truly unlike anything she’s ever done before. Elizabeth spends so much time digging for the fragility in Gracie, that she neglects to acknowledge her own. Elizabeth’s vulnerability hides deep below so many levels of insecurity, one wonders if it could ever be found – the true calling card of any professional actor. But Haynes does find it, and it’s one of the most exhilarating things in any movie this year.
Directed by Todd Haynes