Review: This is Just What Grown-Ups Do
Todd Haynes pulls off viscous, self-aware camp in ‘May December’
The Yearning Rating: ✰✰✰✰½
Romance: ✰✰✰✰
Sex: ✰✰✰½
Storytelling: ✰✰✰✰½
Performance: ✰✰✰✰½
Yearning: ✰✰✰✰✰
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Minimal spoilers, I promise. Also, it’s really not that kind of movie!
Written by Meg Steinfeld-Heim
If the name Todd Haynes rings a bell, but you can’t quite place it—allow me to fill in the gaps. Haynes is the quiet force behind many deeply intricate and stunning sapphic films like Carol. His work, often centering women, features an intrinsically queer voice regardless of the story content. Todd Haynes, who is a gay man, is the first filmmaker who comes to mind when I think of the ‘queer gaze’.
The queer gaze covers the (slowly) emerging increase in queer voices at the helm of publicly consumed media like television and movies, as Hollywood begins to invest more in diverse and experience-inclusive staffing at all levels of production. The L.A. Times has a great piece on this if you’re interested in reading more. As queer people, we have for so long been denied safety in openly queer desire. Thus, there’s the role of subtext; or why we all can find so much unsaid in a long glance, shared between two women standing in front of a mirror together (more on that later). The queer gaze on film doesn’t always lie in what is shown or said out loud—the elusive, subtle nature of an energy exchange between two people is sometimes intentionally evasive in order to exist at all and be protected from violence. Is the yearning in the room with us right now?
May December is centered on a woman who desperately craves a safe, secure place to channel her desire. A successful actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), travels to Savannah, Georgia to research and spend time with a married couple whose sordid past will be the focus of her next film. She will be portraying Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), a woman who, at 36 years-old, was arrested for starting a romantic and sexual relationship with a seventh grader. This was twenty years ago, and after Gracie’s prison sentence the couple eventually reunited amidst the controversy, married, and had three children. At first, when Elizabeth arrives, everything seems shockingly normal and white picket fence-y; there are kids running around and Joe, Gracie’s husband, is out back grilling. Moore grimly delivers one of my favorite lines straight to the refrigerator (“I don’t think we have enough hot dogs”) before cutting to an overhead shot of the grill with about 25 hot dogs on it.
In fits and bursts, we see glimpses of anxiety and doubt creep through Gracie’s facade of a happy, stable suburban life. She pivots wildly between blithe confidence and sudden, tearful outbursts (always in private). While she initially welcomes Elizabeth into their life and home, it's clear that her inquisitive presence is destabilizing. But Elizabeth, who moves through the world with the careful measure of a celebrity expecting constant public scrutiny, is initially reassuring yet vague. “I hope to be able to share something that is true,” she echoes repeatedly when asked why she wants to make this movie.
What Haynes conveys so perfectly in all of his films are these micro-dynamics; May December is full of tiny, blink-and-you-might-miss-it moments between two people. The reason these are so powerful and important is because they reflect the way we, as actual people—not characters—move through our own lives. We can’t help but catch and scrutinize those little expressions from the people we know or the strangers we encounter. That attunement is human nature; we can’t always know what someone else is thinking or feeling, so we’re moved to interpret. Or maybe I’m just anxious. But when a movie is packed full of these interactions, you can’t look away—you want to pay the same amount of attention to it that you do to your own, real life. That’s what I find so captivating about Haynes’ work.
The movie is very loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, an American sex offender and teacher who plead guilty in 1997 to second-degree rape of a child. The child was 12 years-old at the time and one of her sixth grade students. They had two children during the course of Letourneau’s time in and out of jail, and eventually married in 2005. They were married for fourteen years before separating in 2019, and Letourneau passed away in July 2020. While Haynes and the script’s writer, Samy Burch, are very clear in press for May December that this is not a biopic nor an exact replica of Letourneau’s case, they acknowledge that doing extensive research into the intricate dynamics of the tabloid-ridden scandal informed certain ways in which they added depth to their characters’ experiences.
This is the darkest of dark comedies. There are so many exaggerated elements of homemaking and happy-healthy-marriage-with-children, down to the matching frilly aprons and fussing over pineapple upside down cake, that you have to laugh. Gracie also has an intense, infantilizing lisp that only comes through…sometimes, but when it does, makes everything she says sound truly ridiculous. This lisp disappears in the moment when she recounts the time that she and Joe first met:”You were in sixth grade? No, seventh”.
While outwardly, Elizabeth is polite and intensely neutral towards Gracie and Joe, she begins to ever-so-delicately hint at some harsher opinions about their marriage. In a flower arranging class, Elizabeth marvels out loud at the fact that “the past doesn’t weigh on” Gracie. Gracie has tricks up her own sleeve as well, carefully choosing when to initiate tiny, violent retaliations against the woman pushing her to consider what most believe to be her darkest moment. While out shopping with her daughter Mary, Elizabeth by her side, Gracie openly comments on how brave Mary is to choose a sleeveless dress like that and “not care” about how her arms look in it. It’s a clear warning; look, my bite is actually just as bad as my bark. As we try to comprehend Gracie’s unique blend of mental illness, emotional volatility and narcissism, May December is asking us a similar question: does Gracie think this was her darkest moment?
As Elizabeth meets with people in the community, brutal comments are casually woven into conversations around town, perfectly mimicking the reflexive way that people in a small town talk shit about each other. This is an amazing example of how May December taps into both ends of the spectrum—there is extreme subtlety, and also over-the-top, Housewives-level snark. Would-be casual moments are elevated dramatically by a loud, thudding piano soundtrack that repeats several times throughout the movie, lending a soap-operian quality.
Is villainy seductive only in art, or can it also be in real life? Or maybe that is just an intrusive thought—you tell me. Either way, May December dances with the devil, because there is something going on with Elizabeth as well. For all her detachedness and professionalism, a morbid fascination begins to develop. Cocoons and emergence and metamorphosis all play both a literal and figurative role in this movie, as layers of identity and curiosity are sloughed away from all characters—particularly the idealized-celebrity figure that Portman perfectly executes. An incredibly indulgent mirror scene where both women flirt with us, each other, and highly pigmented blush is decadently sexual and tense. As Moore reaches to apply blush to herself in demonstration, at the last second she offers, “It might just be easier for me to do this to you”. Sure, it’s creepy—but also super campy in its overt, XXX-video-at-the-Romantic-Depot kinda way. I love it.
Joe is played beautifully by Charles Melton (Riverdale) and his portrayal of what I interpreted as PTSD is both heartbreaking and miraculous. As Elizabeth’s presence also affects his life, he slowly starts to lose his ability to protect and project his non-victimhood. Melton masterfully executes a childlike regression that underscores, simply, just how much was lost for him. When Joe accidentally gets too high with his teenage son, I (and every person in the theater with me) was transported to a moment in our past when we’d helped a friend who’d had too much get home. It was simple but startling to witness a genuine, peer-like energy between a father and his son. And repeatedly, in a haze of parenting, abuse and seduction, Joe is still taken advantage of at every turn. His adulthood is belittled and diminished with reminders that “...this is just what grown-ups do”.
Just when you think the movie might be over, there is a surprise—we make it to the set of Elizabeth’s movie. I won't spoil it for you, but it is another stomach-roiling finale to a Todd Haynes film. A stark departure from the visual beauty of May December, it serves as a good reminder that movies and television can be ugly. In more ways than one!
Also, if you see this and think, huh, Natalie Portman sure likes to make movies where she plays a twisted woman obsessed with another twisted woman, then me too! Feel free to weigh in on that in the comments.
May December is in select theaters now and you can find showings here. It will also be available to stream on Netflix December 1st.
