May December

Twenty years after the tabloid-fodder origins of their scandalous affair, a married couple begins to buckle under the pressure when a Hollywood actress travels to their home to meet them for research for an upcoming film about their past.

Based loosely in the Mary Kay Letourneau rape case, May December opens with an older woman (Moore), who is busy putting the final touches on a family get-together at her waterfront home. She opens the fridge door and stares into it, stone-faced. The audience can’t see into the fridge. The camera zooms in on her as the melodramatic music surges hysterically. What’s in the fridge… What’s in the fridge?!?! Then, almost to herself, the woman quietly considers, "I don't think we have enough hot dogs."

This is pretty much what the whole movie is like, a surreal and deranged slice of life through the lens of a salacious TV Movie-of-the-Week.

Elizabeth Berry (Portman) is a tv actress best know for what sounds like a long-running case-of-the-week Animal Surgeon show called Norah’s Ark, and she has just arrived in Savannah, Georgia with dreams of being a real and respected actress in her head. She’s here to meet the infamous Gracie Atherton (Moore), planning to spend a week with Gracie and her family, getting to know her and her world, because she will soon be playing Gracie in an upcoming "indie" film.

Gracie is infamous because 20 years earlier, as a 36-year-old married woman with kids, she had an "affair" with Joe, a fellow employee at the pet shop where she was employed. At the time, Joe was only in the 7th grade, and her son’s best friend. Their “relationship” (Gracie’s prolonged rape of Joe) was eventually discovered, and Gracie went to prison, where she had Joe’s baby. At the time, the pair were beloved of the daytime talkshows, gossip rags, and grocery store tabloids. Once she got out of jail, Gracie left her husband, as well as the children they had together,so that she and Joe could be married. The two of them have been together ever since, living in close proximity to Gracie’s ex-husband and her adult children, and in that time, she and Joe have had two more children, who are now as old as Gracie’s grandchildren. Now, with one child already in college, and the other two about to graduate high school, they will soon be empty-nesters. Joe is no longer a seventh grader, of course, he’s now the same age as Gracie was when they first met, but to Gracie, he is obviously still a boy, and she is is weird mom-wife figure, assigning him chores, comeforting him like a child, and snuggling together to watch the sunset. Joe otherwise mostly stands to one side, quietly pleasant, a giant hulking teenage boy-man adult, eager to please, seemingly barely older than own his 17 year old children.

Elizabeth, meanwhile, is busy interviewing friends and family and townspeople, exposing the wounds and fractures, digging into the lurid details lurking below the surface of this sleepy little city. She even visits the pet shop, and quietly masturbates in the back hallway where Gracie and Joe’s first forbidden encounter happened. Most importantly, she’s mirroring Gracie, picking up on her mannerisms, her gestures, her lisp, her fashion and make-up choices. It’s a slow transformation, very gradual, but it soon becomes clear that Elizabeth is just as predatory as Gracie. Portman’s delivery of the line “This is just what grown-ups do” near the film’s end is incredible.

Gracie, on the other hand, is a cypher. She is terrifying, and yet also pitiful. She's definitely a sociopath who sees nothing wrong with anything she’s done, but at the same time, she seems to love Joe, at least, in her own selfish way. She’s like a kind of sad beauty queen, past her prime, but refusing to admit it, and living a life completely disconnected from reality. Her infamy financed her large home, but it also means she regularly receives boxes of poop from angry strangers. Neither of these things seems to bother her, and yet, the slightest disruption in her carefully curated life causes her to completely meltdown. She gives the distinct impression that she might stab you in the face for using the wrong fork. There’s hints of abuse and extreme damage in her past, but it’s all kept behind the pleasant and smiling curtain she hangs over everything, making it impossible to tell the lies from the truths.

And then there’s Joe, the poor forlorn heart at the center of it all, a prisoner of the terrible thing that trapped him as a child, and only now becoming aware of his cage. He seems lost, or maybe just stuck and sad. He loves the monarch butterflies he cares for, raises, and releases, proud of his part in the effort to boost their population, all as he quietly dreams of a woman in his Facebook Butterfly group. Quiet is probably the best word to describe Joe, quiet and small, despite his large size, but you can sense the yearning within him to be free, it’s new, but its also a giant that is only now beginning to shake his cage. Unfortunately for him, he’s sweet and sensitive, nothing but a big stunted 7th grader, saddled with a child’s idea of love, and he’s caught between two predators who want him purely for their own satisfaction.

It’s all a deeply uncomfortable situation. The whole thing… deeply uncomfortable.

Good lord…

The tension just builds and builds. It’s like the worst extended family Thanksgiving, brittle and ready to break, with a feeling like violence could break out at any moment, from any character, and this is bolstered by that hysterically bombastic score. Todd Haynes understands that there is true horror in the mundanity of everyday life, and he uses the softly-lit confines of Savannah to highlight this. The dead-eyed family rituals of the “good people” of America are both terrible and ridiculous, rigid, required, and so tightly controlled as to what’s allowed to be said out loud in public, in their bland environments, with their bland foods, and all of this makes it somehow hilarious too. Haynes understands this, and he pushes it on you. It’s a little unbalancing, that sense of impending trouble, the crazyily surreal Sunday picnic feel of everything. The whole film feels like there’s a rumbling thunderstorm getting closer and closer as the people laugh wildly, uncontrollably. Everything feels dangerous here, which is appropriate, given the appalling subject matters. Dangerous, and yet pleasantly “nice.”

But it’s also not exaggerated—except for the score—the town, the people, the way they look and act and interact, it’s all… very “normal.” Which is the whole trick, right? This isn’t some outlandish parody, or outrageous comedy.

This is “nice” America.

In a story about power and abuse, about lies and deceit, about manipulation and Hollywood, all amongst the wreckage of people’s lives, May December is a thrilling and unsettling experience, like realizing suddenly that you’re standing in the middle of a nest of snakes, unsure of which way to go for safety.

Fantastic film. Loved it.