Nobody gives better Resting Bitch Face than Julianne Moore. Reunited with director Todd Haynes for a fifth time on May December, the diva of dysfunction radiates repressed rage and tremulous inner pain on screen, especially in her gently acerbic exchanges with co-star Natalie Portman. The electrical charge from their shared scenes could power a small city. But sadly, all this energy gets dissipated by an oddly conventional story with soapy overtones and fuzzy intentions. Despite its baffling high-profile slot in the main Cannes competition, this is a slender effort from the auteur creator of Far From Heaven (2002), I’m Not There (2007) and Carol (2015). Box office prospects will hinge more on Portman’s marquee pulling power than the connoisseur indie cineaste credentials of Haynes or Moore.
A passion project for Portman, who first pitched it to Haynes during Covid shutdown, May December is based on a screenplay by Samy Burch, an occasional shorts director primary known for casting credits, notably on the Hunger Games series. Burch plays with some fairly heavy material here: the lines between sexual consent and abuse, guilt and forgiveness, rehabilitation and eternal damnation for child sex offenders. But despite Haynes’ track record of artfully re-framing the language of camp melodrama, he maintains a kind of middlebrow issue-movie flatness here, never delivering the emotional fireworks and psychological catharsis that the set-up seems to promise.
Set in 2015, May December loosely mirrors the real case of Mary Kay Letourneau, a Washington state schoolteacher jailed in 1997 for second-degree rape after she began a sexual relationship with 12-year-old student Vili Fualaau, who she later married. Moore plays Gracie Atherton-Yoo, a superficially steely but brittle 60-ish mother now married to Joe (Charles Melton), the former pet shop co-worker she first seduced two decades ago when he was 13. Her crimes earned her lurid tabloid infamy and a prison term for sex with a minor. But 24 years later, Gracie and Joe are still together, with grown-up kids on the verge of college age, and a grand family home in an upscale island suburb of Savannah, Georgia.
Beneath this air of settled midlife contentment, inevitably, all is not well. Many neighbours have not forgotten or forgiven Gracie’s crimes, with some still sending her anonymous hostile messages. Emotionally stunted and withdrawn, Joe appears to be tentatively flirting with other women online. With hindsight, he is also increasingly troubled about how he came to be with wife, but the topic is too incendiary to raise with her. “You seduced me!” she reminds him. “Who was in charge?” Of course, these are classic child-abuser excuses, although Haynes, Burch and Moore clearly have sympathy for Gracie, depicting her as both victim and villain.
Into this fragile glass menagerie comes Elizabeth Berry (Portman), a glamorous screen star who is about to play Gracie in a low-budget movie about her scandalous affair with Joe. Elizabeth wants to do first-hand research for her character, and Gracie has generously consented to sharing her time and home, despite misgivings that deepen as the Hollywood interloper begins sniffing around her family, friends and ex-husband. Close-up scenes of Moore and Portman suspiciously circling and mirroring each other’s body language have a compellingly prickly chemistry. But all this latent erotic tension and Bergman-esque blurring of identities remains largely unexamined by a screenplay that favours soapy plot twists and glib resolutions.
May December is carried by its two powerhouse female leads, with a sizzling straight-to-camera monologue by Portman serving as a late highlight. But when neither is on screen, the secondary cast inevitably fade into blandness, not helped by a crowded field of thinly written minor characters. While Haynes is rightly renowned for his visual verve, he appears defeated by the material here, or perhaps simply hamstrung by a compact 23-day shoot. His most ambitious stylistic decision is an arch recycling of Michel Legrand’s torrid piano score from Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between (1971), which hints at a pleasingly post-modern dialogue with cinematic history, but also risks inviting unflattering comparison with a far superior film than this modestly engaging but emphatically minor work.
Director: Todd Haynes
Screenwriter: Samy Burch
Cast: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, Cory Michael Smith, Elizabeth Yu, Gabriel Chung, Piper Curda, D.W. Moffet
Cinematography: Christopher Blauvelt
Editing: Affonso Gonçalves
Production designer: Sam Lisenco
Music: Marcelo Zavros
Producers: Natalie Portman, Sophie Mas, Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler, Grant S. Johnson, Tyler W. Konney, Jessica Elbaum, Will Ferrell
Production companies: MountainA (US), Gloria Sanchez Productions (US), Killer Films (US)
World sales: Rocket Science, UK
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In English
113 minutes
