May December
Directed by Todd Haynes
Running time: 1hr53 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore star in May December
I’ve always been a bit thrown by the predominantly American idiom “May-December romance”, used to denote a relationship with a notable age gap between two partners — one, if you follow the metaphor to the letter, in the springy blush of youth, the other in a barren late-life winter. It rather implies, if a four-season year here equals a lifetime, that death is just around the corner for the older party; that the romance, happy or otherwise, will be fleeting. But what if it continues past its socially presumed expiry date, if spring ticks over into autumn, and December into another year altogether? What then?
Both wickedly funny and piercingly sad, Todd Haynes’ new film ponders one such improbable union — the subject of a national tabloid scandal, no less — as it lurches through its third decade, having settled into a complacent imitation of picket-fence normality, without ever feeling quite normal at all. At 36, Southern housewife Gracie (Julianne Moore) had a sexual affair with 13-year-old schoolboy Joe, earning herself a jail sentence and the collective ire of the whole country when caught out. Twenty-plus years and three children later, however, Gracie and Joe (played as an adult by Riverdale star Charles Melton), they’re still together.
Notwithstanding the odd anonymous package of faeces sent in the mail, the public has largely moved on from the matter, but their memory is about to be jogged by a prestige biopic going into production, with celebrated actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) playing Gracie. With notebook in hand and a cultivated manner of polite neutrality, she turns up at the couple’s suburban home to find out what makes them tick; what ensues is a flinty, perverse and entirely fascinating war of passive-aggressive wills between star and subject, as Gracie attempts to put her best face forward, and Elizabeth tries her best to lift the mask. As both their respective constructions of “Gracie” as a character merge and blur, the film begins to play as Bergman’s Persona as filtered through the gauzy lens of American daytime drama and dehumanising National Enquirer reportage — the trappings through which Gracie, for all her protests to the contrary, still understands her story.
Under Elizabeth’s close, destabilising watch, Gracie and Joe’s marriage appears to flounder — though the closer we get to Joe, unlocked via Melton’s subtle, canny performance from placid himbo to lonely, perma-arrested manchild, the more it appears always to have been to be an over-extended exercise in saving face. Can you style out a whole misjudged life? Equally fair to all three principals (which is to say, sometimes, uniformly savage), May December plays out in a register of ultra-arch camp that nods to the soap-operatics of the whole premise and the characters’ competitive centring of themselves in the drama.
Across his career, Haynes exhibited an eye for melodramatic pastiche and an ear for screamingly repressed emotion. Both are at play here, though gone are the exquisitely refined aesthetics of films like Carol and Far From Heaven; with its bleachy light, disorienting zooms and brazen, deliberately jarring interpolation of Michael Legrand’s piano theme for Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between, the filmmaking here returns Haynes to the jaggedly austere mid-’90s experimentation of Safe, or even the heightened trash-culture sampling of his Barbie-doll opus Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. It’s a thrilling reunion, too, with his old muse Moore, never better than when playing spiralling mania beneath the tightest of smiles, and ideally coordinated with Portman’s glassy, calculated artifice. All is performance, or performance of performance, which just happens to be Haynes’ sweet spot as a filmmaker too.
MAY DECEMBER (2023) Written by Samy Burch | Shot by Christopher Blauvelt | Edited by Affonso Gonçalves
Playing at the 76th Cannes Film festival as part of the Competition strand