Review: "May December" is Todd Haynes at his most tonally complex - and rewarding

Featuring career-best work by Natalie Portman

There’s a moment right near the beginning of Todd Haynes’ May December where Julianne Moore goes to get something out of the fridge, and the camera zooms in dramatically with a big soap-operatic musical sting as she looks furtively over her shoulder; it’s a jarring stylistic intrusion, a moment out of a cheap TV show or an even cheaper 80s slasher movie – and it’s the moment I knew we were in the very best of hands.  

It’s a Todd Haynes film, of course, so in some way that’s obvious from the get-go; there are few safer hands to be in, especially with difficult subject matter. Still, this is as delicate a premise as he’s ever tackled: The true story of Mary Kay Letourneau with the serial numbers filed off, basically, of an adult woman who raped a middle-schooler and then married him after her stint in prison. As dramatized here, it is perhaps the most ambitious tonal tightrope Haynes has attempted to walk since his debut film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story – a movie so dangerous to its surviving subjects that it can only be viewed as a multi-generational bootleg. Like that film, May December blends complete straight-faced sincerity and immense vulnerability with high, winking camp, its heart on its sleeve and its tongue planted firmly in its cheek.

The film is at times harrowing, at times hilarious, at times deeply uncomfortable and cringe-inducing, at times revelatory in its unbridled emotional honesty. Half the dialogue consists of double entendre, some of it subtle, some of it brilliantly sophomoric – sometimes both at the same time; in one scene, Natalie Portman – playing the actress who will depict Moore’s character in an upcoming film – walks into the pet store stock room where Moore was discovered with her preteen victim all those years ago, and the owner says “just don’t touch the bait.” It took a second to land, and then I laughed very hard – and then I thought about it, and my heart sank. The flip side is a sequence where Charles Melton’s character – Joe, the boy who Moore’s character groomed, now a man who is her husband and a father facing an empty nest at age 36 – tries to express his feelings of how and why this ‘affair’ might have scarred him in ways he’s never really confronted, and it is as difficult and vulnerable and heart-wrenching as anything I’ve seen all year. There are very few directors who work like this, who revel so unabashedly in contradictions, who use tone to destabilize and challenge their audience with such surgical precision; fewer still are capable of pulling it off. Haynes is singular.

Julianne Moore is of course an essential partner in this, as she has been several times before in Haynes’ career. What I am about to say might sound cruel, but I intend it as a compliment: When Moore is asked to play more-or-less normal human beings, or used in a more familiar movie star capacity, she’s never really worked for me as a performer. When she plays weirdos and deviants and people with a screw loose, even subtly, and especially in contexts like these where the movie around her also has a screw loose, she is one of the most captivating performers on the planet. Nobody knows this better than Haynes, and no actor has ever quite been as fully on his wavelength. There’s a reason all their films together, including this one, are in such intense conversation with the work of Douglas Sirk; Moore and Haynes have a mutual understanding of how challenging Sirk’s particular vision of melodrama was, and how surface-level sentimentality can be weaponized as something that feels truly dangerous.

Natalie Portman may just be the same kind of performer, now that I think about it. This is pretty comfortably the best work she’s ever done on film, though it’s absolutely of a piece with her previous career high points, where she plays people who look put together on the surface and are roiling and contradictory underneath. Her work here is such a wonderfully dense and layered piece of acting, one where you can always see the cogs turning, always see the thought behind every gesture and intonation, because her character is always ‘on,’ always calculating, always wearing her interpretation of the world she sees in her body language. Portman is simply captivating. She plays an actress who has achieved fame playing a veterinarian on a terrible-but-popular network TV drama named “Norah’s Ark,” which is just a stupendously funny piece of backstory; in any case, she has a chip on her shoulder about it, and the push-and-pull for the audience is whether she is actually better than this TV show weighing her down, or only believes she is. In a standout scene, she is interviewed by some high school students and responds to the class clown’s juvenile question about sex scenes by giving a full monologue about the thin line between performing pleasure and feeling it; while watching, I found myself thinking that no matter how much I’ve enjoyed Portman’s work in previous films, I honestly didn’t know she had a performance this titanically great in her. She then one-ups it at least a few more times, with another monologue delivered straight to camera near the end, but also in the film’s final scene, where we finally see the movie she’s been researching as it gets filmed. We were led to believe, throughout the film, that this would be some kind of awards bait indie darling feature, but it looks and feels like a cheap porno, pure exploitation. Nevertheless, Portman – and Portman in character as a woman playing a character – is fully committed, delivering a moment that is both deadly serious drama and knockout killer comedy. She hits on the film’s entire messy thesis through voice and body language. It is incredible work.  

May December is in subject matter an intimate film, but it is a gigantic work of art, one I don’t think I could adequately grapple with in ten different reviews. There are so many layers to what Haynes and his collaborators are doing here, so many themes above and beyond just the central dilemma of grappling with a relationship built on an inexcusable crime; it is also about performance, and image, and duality, and duplicity, and sexuality, and so much more. It is a movie positively rife with visual symbolism, much of it intentionally obvious, all of it still so complex. There is a shot near the end that may be my favorite in any film this year. Joe discovers one of the butterflies he raises – seemingly his only hobby or interest of note beyond attending to his family – has hatched from its chrysalis; he gently lifts it on his finger to bring outside. We watch him do it in the hazy reflection of the sliding glass door as dusk starts to settle in, and just as it flies away, his daughter, on the literal eve of graduating high school and leaving the nest, walks into frame. The symbol becomes literal; a few scenes later, Joe cries as he watches her walk across the graduation stage, and we realize the fundamental sin inflicted upon him: That nobody ever did this for him. Nobody ever got to nurture him and then lovingly let him go; he has only ever been possessed. 

It is poetry. Pure poetry, cinematic and visual, expressive to the fullest. This movie may be a masterpiece.

May December is currently playing in limited theatrical release, and will be streaming on Netflix starting December 1^st, where I desperately hope it isn’t immediately buried and forgotten like most of what they distribute.

If you liked this review, I have 200 more for you – read my new book, 200 Reviews, in Paperback and on Kindle: https://a.co/d/bivNN0e

Support the show at Ko-fi ☕️ https://ko-fi.com/weeklystuff

Subscribe to JAPANIMATION STATION, our podcast about the wide, wacky world of anime: https://www.youtube.com/c/japanimationstation  

Subscribe to The Weekly Stuff Podcast on all platforms: https://weeklystuffpodcast.com