May December

 

★★★★★

There is always the story of a perfect American family that has something sinister & dark beneath the surface. Keeping up the appearance of a perfect family is a struggle for those with shady pasts, & the question is: how long before the veil is tossed & everything is shown for what it is? And who, or what, will be the undoing?

May December is ultimately a story of appearances, both what we keep up in order to stave off the past, & what we use to become other people. Set in 2015, the film follows Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), a noted television actress. Elizabeth, who considers herself a method actress, has chosen a particularly meaty role for her next film, a true crime drama where she portrays Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), a former pet shop clerk, who in 1992, was arrested at the age of 36 for having a sexual relationship with 13-year-old Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), a classmate of her son Georgie (Cory Michael Smith). Gracie ultimately served time in prison for her crime, but after her sentence, has married Joe & settled down with him on bucolic Tybee Island in Georgia, with three kids in tow: Honor (Piper Curda), conceived during the initial relationship; & twins Charlie (Gabriel Chung) & Mary (Elizabeth Yu), who are about to graduate high school. Since her release, Gracie & Joe have ultimately made an idyllic life for themselves & their children, or as idyllic as one can be when boxes of fecal matter are intermittently sent to their house.

So off to Tybee Island goes Elizabeth to meet the Atherton-Yoo family & shadow them for her role. Gracie & Joe are moderately excited to have her come along, while the children range from being starstruck to questioning the idea of Elizabeth's decision to shadow in the first place. 

Elizabeth toils through the tabloids & the people surrounding the case to get towards the truth needed for her best performance. But her arrival threatens to tear apart the life that Gracie & Joe have made, as pressure causes long-held feelings to arise.

The performances are exemplary. Natalie Portman gives a performance rivaling her Oscar-winning turn in Black Swan. Julianne Moore, as always, is phenomenal, as a woman in denial. But it's Charles Melton who ultimately runs away with the film. Melton perfectly portrays a heavy role with a sense of arrested development, never growing from the moment he was first abused, & coming to terms with the horror of it all.

Todd Haynes' direction walks a fine tightrope. It's hard to make a film about such a sensitive topic funny in some parts. And yet, when it calls for humor, it works. Haynes has always been a man obsessed with camp & melodrama, evidenced especially in his 2002 ode to Douglas Sirk, Far From Heaven. And here, it's also especially evident, evoking the filmography of not only Douglas Sirk, but also that of his contemporary, Pedro Almodóvar. But Haynes also infuses the film with an overwhelmingly uncomfortable aura of dread, as the audience slowly reads past the tabloid-infused narratives & looks deeper into the human cost.

Samy Burch's brilliant screenplay is at once both a deeply affecting look at the haunting aftereffects of grooming & a darkly funny satire of method acting & how pointless it is. Burch, in her first published screenplay, further adds to the melodramatic camp atmosphere that Haynes has set up with a quasi-soap opera approach containing witty dialogue, yet never fails to move past how damaging the abuse is. The film is obviously inspired by the case of Mary Kay Letourneau, who abused her student Vili Fualaau & then married him, & it critiques many of the sick tabloid narratives that came about in that case.

This film about appearances & how they can be deceiving is one of the best of the year. It's a testament to Todd Haynes' ability as an auteur, Samy Burch's ability to tackle such a thorny subject in her first screenplay, & the cast's ability to take on such complex roles in such a multifaceted manner that this all works.

May December is now showing on Netflix. Its runtime is 117 minutes, & it is rated R for some sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use, & language.