May December isn’t going to hold you by the hand and tell you how to feel about these people let alone whether any of this reproachable calamity was worth anything. Without spoiling May December‘s final punchline, I’ll say this much: just when you think the knife twist is over, it hits a bone. The jokes in this movie make you want to rip your skin off and jump off a cliff. At one point, after scanning through the self-tapes of the child actors vying to play Joe in the film, a thoroughly lost-in-the-sauce Elizabeth tells her producer she doesn’t think any of these kids are sexy enough. It’s like Persona filtered through the lens of a Telenovela identity horror intermingled with dramatic zooms, melodramatic piano, and some of the darkest jokes you’re liable to find this year. Haynes and company deserve a trophy for the tonal tightrope walk on display here. He was robbed of his innocence and is, simultaneously, trapped in it. And he doesn’t know what to do with his hands when he confronts his wife, between sobs, about what she did to him twenty years ago. He cares and tends to endangered monarch butterflies, who enjoy the growth and freedom he’ll never get to experience. He smokes weed for the first time with his teenage son on the roof. But he doesn’t have a full toolkit to deal with the parts of adult life you only garner from experience. He’s a genuinely loving husband and a caring father. Melton mentally traps Joe in the fulcrum of his trauma. Both women are terrible people in different directions: one unapologetically and unrepentantly herself and the other dead-set on consuming and regurgitating the sins, mannerisms, and audacity of her subject.Īnd yet, even alongside Oscar winners firing on all cylinders, Melton gives what is easily the breakout performance of the year. Portman and Moore (the latter of whom celebrates her fifth collaboration with Haynes), are as captivating and stupendous as you’d expect barbed, cagey, and armed to the teeth with acrid double meanings and cruel smiles. But isn’t that a justifiable sacrifice for a truly great piece of art? And so a horrifying and deeply funny tête-à-tête ensues between Elizabeth, an unstoppable, invasive force, and Gracie, an immovable, willfully naive object. How else will she evoke an honest and three-dimensional portrait of the flawed, complex woman that is Gracie? It’s going to be uncomfortable, sure. And so, the actress begins to poke around, even arranging an impromptu meeting with Gracie’s adult son from a previous marriage ( Cory Michael Smith), who is, nauseatingly, the same age as Joe.įor their part, Gracie and Joe justifiably fear the new film will peel the scab off a barely-healed wound bringing new, unwanted attention to their family just as their kids leave home for college. Like us, Elizabeth suspects that the couple is not nearly as secure and doubt-free as they claim to be. Joe ( Charles Melton), now Gracie’s husband and the father of her children, appears perfectly well-adjusted if somewhat isolated and awkward. May December follows Elizabeth ( Natalie Portman), a Hollywood actress who travels to Georgia to research her upcoming role as Gracie ( Julianne Moore), a southern housewife whose scandalous statutory rape of a seventh grader captivated the nation twenty years ago. Hazmat suits are optional but recommended. And with that out of the way, let’s dive in. I’d say “thank me later,” but the dawning realization of what Haynes is up to is more dramatically fulfilling than it is pleasant. If you’ve somehow stumbled across this review and don’t know what May December is about, scroll down to the bottom of this article (you know, for SEO purposes) and pop over to Netflix. It’s all very: “Did you see that? But isn’t he a bit… you know? Wait… she has another kid from a previous… and he’s…?” That said, while I’m sure knowing the sordid shape of things is rewarding, the experience of going in blind is the cinematic equivalent of being deputized as the village gossip. After all, the film’s title outright announces the not-so-secret elephant in the room to those in the know. Haynes, along with the film’s writers Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik, are by no means trying to conceal the salacious lynchpin about which May December turns. And, in the practiced hands of director Todd Haynes, it only gets more uncomfortable, twisted, and campy from there. But that perfectly routine display of intimacy was easily one of the most shocking things I saw on-screen this year. On paper, it’s nothing out of the ordinary: a caress between a married couple throwing a garden party in the backyard of their sprawling Savannah home. There is a moment early in the set-dressing of May December when my jaw swung open like the doors of a well-loved saloon.
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