“May December” operates on many levels at once, allowing audiences to speculate as to Gracie’s motivations (the reason we are drawn to movies like the one being made about her) even as we watch Elizabeth “become” her character. Will this actor truly be able to do her story justice? The same age gap separates Gracie from Elizabeth that existed between the woman and her victim. Laying clues that will pay off later, she inappropriately discusses the nuances of filming sex scenes to these teens. “It’s the complexity, the moral gray areas, that are so interesting,” Elizabeth tells a high school acting class. It’s a thorough dive into the psychology of everyone involved, not least of all those who’d be drawn to play such a role. There’s clearly more to this relationship than meets the eye, and Elizabeth can only uncover so much of it in the handful of days she’s arranged to observe the Yoo family.Īs Elizabeth goes about her research, trying to get into Gracie’s skin by interviewing her ex-husband and those who know her best, what follows isn’t merely a captivating deconstruction of an actor’s process. One of Gracie and Joe’s survival strategies - what Joan Didion called the stories “we tell ourselves … in order to live” - is to insist that they’re still in love, although private scenes find him texting flirtatiously with someone else. Tone is everything in movies like this, and Haynes goes out of his way to avoid the sensationalism that made “To Die For” or “Cry-Baby” so delectably campy. Haynes and screenwriter Samy Burch present that backstory in pieces, allowing audiences to form their first impressions of Gracie before discovering her crime. A media circus followed, and their baby was “born behind bars,” as the gossip rags put it. They were caught in flagrante delicto in the stockroom of the Georgia pet shop where Gracie and Joe both worked. Gracie welcomes Portman’s Elizabeth Berry, star of a popular TV series called “Norah’s Ark,” into the Savannah home she shares with Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), the much-younger “May” to this woman’s “December.” Joe was just 13 when they fell in love. But she’s hardly the first to have optimistically accepted such an offer. Now a grandmother (by her first marriage), Gracie hopes that a new indie film will bring some nuance to her story - which doesn’t seem especially likely, if Netflix’s “The Staircase” and other examples are to be considered. It didn’t help that there was a crappy TV movie made about the scandal at the time, which Haynes amusingly samples at one point. Not so “May December.” As layered and infinitely open-to-interpretation as any of his films, it’s also the most generous and direct, beginning not with Ingmar Bergman references (those come later), but with ripe hothouse footage of monarch butterflies, underscored by a lush reworking of Michel Legrand’s piano theme from “The Go-Between.” The potential for passion, transformation and subversion hangs heavy in the air.Īs Gracie Atherton-Yoo, Moore plays a woman with a Teflon conscience who, even after more than two decades, is still deflecting public criticism. From the rich Douglas Sirkian pastiche of “Far From Heaven” to the queer twist on classical “woman’s pictures” provided by “Carol,” his style can be chilly and distancing. The movie wants to know: Can playing this Mary Kay Letourneau-like tabloid sensation really answer what makes such a woman tick?Ī heady director whose entire oeuvre feels ripe for film-studies dissertations, Haynes makes movies not merely to be watched, but to be analyzed and deconstructed after the fact. It’s easy to imagine Todd Haynes being tempted to start his deep-as-you-want-to-go rabbit-hole drama “ May December” the same way, seeing as how this endlessly fascinating movie focuses on the blurring of the lines between a Hollywood star (Natalie Portman) and her true-crime character ( Julianne Moore), who was caught in a sexual relationship with a 7th grader at the age of 36. In the experimental montage that opens “Persona,” a bare-chested teenage boy caresses a screen upon which the faces of two women slowly morph back and forth.
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