Gracie and Elizabeth are both dominant and controlling, and it's easy to forget the carnage Gracie has caused. There's an incredible scene between Joe and his teenage son where Joe breaks down in tears, saying, "I can't tell if we're connecting or if I'm creating a bad memory for you." It's heartbreaking. He doesn't take up any space, emotional or physical. Melton is a strong, tall man, but it's like Joe is invisible. Gracie treats him like a child, giving him chores to do. Joe spends his free time monitoring his butterfly collection and drinking beer. It's fascinating, bold work.Ĭharles Melton, as Joe, is the heart and soul of this sick system. Does she have any idea how that sounds? If you're looking for answers, Julianne Moore is not here to provide them on a platter. "I was very sheltered, and he matured very fast," she says. She talks to Elizabeth, having no idea how "off" she seems, considering the circumstances. She doesn't feel she did anything wrong she loves her husband. Julianne Moore's performance is so interesting because, at a certain point, you have to face the possibility that there isn't more to Gracie than meets the eye. Is she transforming because she's "becoming" Gracie, or is the real Elizabeth finally being revealed? Portman's reading of the line "This is what grown-ups do" was such a gut punch I never recovered my equilibrium. Portman's work here is very tricky because it happens by degrees. Elizabeth's quest to "become" Gracie is, ultimately, predatory, another strange element in a movie about an actual legal predator. There is a long " Persona"-like scene where the two characters stare directly into the camera, side by side, Gracie putting on makeup as Elizabeth watches her voraciously. There are multiple scenes involving mirrors, one where Elizabeth is bookended by two Gracies, all three sitting in the same way. She mirrors her hand gestures, lisping voice, posture, fashion choices, and lipstick shade. It won't be the last time.Īlmost imperceptibly, Elizabeth mirrors Gracie. You have to completely re-think Elizabeth. But then she is invited to speak with a high school drama club, and things take such a bizarre turn during the Q&A period that it's one of the most uncomfortable scenes in a film wall to wall with uncomfortable scenes. Because Gracie and Joe's past is so notorious and everyone clams up when the subject is raised, Elizabeth is an innocent strolling through a strange world. From the brief hints we get, her career is less than inspiring, so she's ambitious to do something challenging. At first, Elizabeth seems like a nice enough woman, doing her due diligence for a role she's excited about. One of the feints at work is how our perceptions of Elizabeth change. It's unsettling to be confused in a film about this subject. The events of "May December" are so objectively appalling they scream for a moral judgment to be handed down, and yet the deeper it goes, the more confusing things get. Every time you think there is solid ground, the tectonic plates shift, leaving you grasping empty air. The film could not be less interested in "what happened" or "why." "May December" refuses to make declarative statements. Samy Burch's script is somewhat inspired by Mary Kay Letourneau, but "May December" adds layers upon layers of strangeness and subjectivity. Joe ( Charles Melton) is now 36, the same age as Gracie was when they first met in the pet shop. They have three children and are about to be empty nesters. After serving her time, Gracie and Joe married and have been together ever since. The tabloids, unsurprisingly, went berserk for the story. Gracie went to prison, where she had Joe's baby behind bars. This fellow employee, named Joe, was in the seventh grade. What could this unremarkable woman, whose main concern is a lack of hot dogs, have ever done to warrant a movie being made about her? Turns out, 20 years earlier, Gracie, a 36-year-old married woman with kids, had an "affair" with a fellow employee at a pet shop. Gracie has agreed-inexplicably, once you know the facts-to allow this stranger to hang out with her family for a week or so, the same week her twins will graduate from high school. "May December" is one of Haynes' most unbalancing and provocative films.Įlizabeth Berry (Portman) is a television actress who arrived in Savannah, Georgia, to meet Gracie Atherton (Moore), whom she will be playing in an upcoming "indie" movie. This sense of danger is part of the movie's perverse fun. The situation in "May December" is so serious it feels dangerous to even joke about it. Haynes sees the humor in all these juxtapositions but knows the horror is real. These things are not just stylistic flourishes. He was shaped, in many ways, by 1950s melodramas and all that psychosexual Technicolor torment. Todd Haynes sees the horror in the every day, the emptiness in ritual, the void underneath conformist trappings.
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