Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore Work Sly Wonders in ‘May December’

Director Todd Haynes’s new film May December, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, announces its intent early. Over the opening credits, the film’s score—some of it by Marcelo Zarvos, other selections adapted by Zarvos from Michel Legrand’s compositions for The Go-Between—sets the stage for a movie that’s half Old Hollywood pulp, half ’90s erotic thriller. An imminent campiness is implied, some sort of tawdry melodrama that is aware of itself, but not in so arch a fashion that it devolves into meta shtick. 

Haynes is not really known as a comedy director. But that’s the genre May December most closely resembles, dark as its matters may be. Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth Berry, a Juilliard-trained actor who stars on a hit TV series and is researching a role for an independent film. She travels to Savannah, Georgia to meet her subject, Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), a baker and former tabloid celebrity who was imprisoned for statutory rape after embarking on a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old boy, Joe, who worked at the pet store she managed. It was a huge story in the 1990s, just as teacher Mary Kay Letourneau’s was in our world. 

Letourneau and the boy involved eventually had children and got married, separating shortly before Letourneau’s death in 2020. May December finds Gracie and Joe (played by Charles Melton, of Riverdale fame) in a not dissimilar circumstance. Twenty years after the scandal, they are married in seeming contentment. Occasionally, they’re harassed or side-eyed. But otherwise, they manage to be functioning, relatively welcome members of their community. 

In breezes Hollywood to disrupt all that. Gracie is wary of Elizabeth, but she and Joe have convinced themselves that she will tell their story in a fair way. We take this to mean that Elizabeth and the filmmakers will gloss over the actual mechanics of what happened, and instead focus on the true and enduring love the couple has enjoyed since Gracie’s release from prison. The couple’s twins, who seem pretty well-adjusted (the same cannot be said of Gracie’s other children), are headed off to college, leaving Joe—at only 36 or so—facing the life of an empty nester.

Destabilizing as her presence may be, Elizabeth is really only prying open already extant cracks in this fraught relationship, one thus far sustained by Joe’s eerie (but understandable) childlike guilelessness and Gracie’s tight management of their domestic routine. Gracie is an oddball, prone to swings of emotion and adept at acidic backhanded compliments. (Which is to say, she’s a perfect role for Moore.) It’s no wonder that Elizabeth is immediately so predatorily entranced. What a character. And what a story, a pathetic comedy that may actually be (well, almost assuredly is) a tragedy. 

With a lightness not exactly typical of Haynes, May December fascinatingly explores its ethical dimensions, one foot planted firmly in the realm of camp while the other figures out where to land. At various points, it seems the film will mutate into a thriller—what with Elizabeth’s asthma and the heavy foreshadowing of Gracie’s love of hunting. At other times, the film could be settling into a solemn drama about humble people just trying to live decent lives in the years after a media frenzy. 

Ultimately, the film is neither thriller nor drama. Samy Burch’s script teems with idiosyncratic humor, not quite John Waters but somewhere on the road to that. Softening the comedy, at least somewhat, is the film’s tentative compassion for these people, for the way their lives have healed over—but not actually healed—the horrible transgression of the past. They are stuck in a sorry delusion. In that light, perhaps only Elizabeth, played so shrewdly by Portman, is the truly cynical one, a vampire artist troubling these strange waters to study how the fish react. 

Maybe the film is a satire of the entertainment industry in that way, vain and manipulative Elizabeth standing in for all of Hollywood’s exploitation of true life. In one scene, Elizabeth visits the local high school theater club to do a little Q&A with the students. She soon goes off on an indulgent monologue about sex scenes (surely trying to get a rise out of one particular boy, maybe to passingly try her hand at that sort of seduction—for research, of course) before insulting Gracie right to her daughter’s face. Any reassurance Elizabeth has given that she is there to objectively observe this family is quickly dispelled. She’s come to prod at the freaks in their show, with the understanding that Elizabeth’s fans will someday pay to see her curated re-creation of it. 

Then again, how much compassion does Gracie really deserve? May December offers up a tricky moral equation—even the film itself is a quandary. How much should we be laughing at this, or with this? That assessment will have to be made in the eye of each beholder. On first viewing, though, I found May December to be a wicked, complex delight, weird and clever and just humane enough to rescue itself from bleakness. Its two lead performances are bitingly funny, while Melton ably provides the heart—and heartbreak—of the film. May December feels like a return to Haynes’s outre origins, a stylish character study that, when inspected closer, may actually have an entire culture—its art, its sexual mores—on its nimble mind.