Did you know that the real woman who May December is based on came from a staunchly Republican family? As in her father was a famously racist Republican state and federal politician, and two of her brothers worked in the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump respectively. Just a fun fact.
There’s been a moral panic of grooming in the ever-toxic political discourse these past couple years, so much so that it (intentionally) obfuscates the issue of sexual predation. Conservatives would have you believe that it’s almost entirely a left-wing LGBTQ phenomenon, and have been trying their hardest to make the term synonymous with the transgender community specifically. But of course theirs is a made-up definition designed to marginalize and stoke the same old fears about LGBTQ identity, while routinely minimizing or ignoring genuine sexual grooming and its effects.
It is this that is the most potent subject of analysis and exposure in Todd Haynes’ new film, more unsettling even than the crime that took place in the movie’s backstory. Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth Berry, a famous actress researching the part she’ll be playing in an upcoming biopic by getting close to the subject and her family. That subject is Gracie Atherton (Julianne Moore), who served prison time for sexually abusing a thirteen-year-old boy, having three children by him, and ultimately going on to marry him in his adulthood. The tabloid scandal has deeply fascinated the public and alienated the family, who on the surface seem remarkably well-adjusted.
Elizabeth’s captivation with all this is a mirror of our own, the public’s twisted fascination with such taboo stories while completely disconnected from the reality of it all. From the start, her interest in this family is clinical, even while she says all the right words about valuing them and taking into consideration their feelings. Haynes underlines the detachment, in her and also the audience, from the ramifications of the life this family has had to live -and at the same time the perverse interest that causes Elizabeth to in the guise of this research interview more people and delve deeper into the story than is seemingly necessary. The Atherton-Yoo clan meanwhile feels their narrative has been misunderstood, and are to some degree rightly suspicious that a film project will only further publicly alienate them. One of the daughters attends an interview conducted with Elizabeth and is upset by her rather ill-thought remarks about the attraction to playing “morally ambiguous” characters. Joe (Charles Melton) in particular is tired of the media notion that he is a “victim”, pointing to the fact that he and Gracie are still together all these years later.
But Joe is a curious case. A quiet, introverted man who carries himself cautiously, and who is clearly very anxious about his twin children graduating -his older daughter had graduated a couple years earlier. He claims to be content in spite of his experiences and yet there’s clearly some degree of tension in his relationship to his family. He spends a lot of time alone with his monarch butterfly hobby and in conversation with someone he met through facebook. He has a heart-to-heart with his son on the rooftop that is more for his benefit than the kid’s. In many ways he still is a kid himself, his maturity stunted by being so young a parent and convincing himself this is what he wanted for his life. And with all the children soon gone he faces the prospect of life alone with Gracie for the first time. There’s a chilling effect whenever the film focuses on Joe, and Elizabeth’s uncouth attraction towards him, his tensed up body language and unconvincing attitude is just so precise -Melton playing him with a viscerally profound psychological evolution as to his tragedy that rarely breaches the surface. He completely steals the movie out from under the feet of Moore and Portman, which is saying a lot given the depth of their performances as well.
There is something of a reflection of Melton’s performance in Moore’s, which is drawn with a much more haunted sense of arrested development. Soft-spoken yet stern, she doesn’t have any kind of emotional maturity, is unable to make sense of complex feelings -deliberately closed-off to much of the bad press surrounding her. We find out that she and Joe have never had a single conversation about what happened, despite it being the event that has shaped their lives. Her life is lived in denial -she constantly (and even retroactively) attributes mature qualities to Joe’s character as a way of justifying herself and her abuse, in baffling ways. And how she makes her money as an independent baker, which she talks up but only ever has small collection of clients who know her. Moore taps into a small pitiable quality there, but understands the darker recesses that underline Gracie’s motivations -that she fundamentally has no remorse over what she did and views it in a heinously twisted light.
And then there’s Elizabeth, endeavouring to understand her in her own warped cynical fashion. Haynes applies an almost satirical lens to her method, and by extension the Hollywood biopic industry itself. There are beats played ironically, little aspects to Elizabeth’s approach that are very idiosyncratic in a way that could only come from observation. The very notion of playing a real person, consulting with them, is seen as an uncomfortable exercise –regardless of who they are – from the vantage point of those on the borders of that story themselves. The fact that a life is seen as a “story”, that can just be told and retold, is offensive as Haynes is sure to point out. And we see a range of reactions to the cynical capitalizing on that life as Elizabeth makes her way through the connected people: Gracie’s former boss at the pet store is perturbed, her ex-husband discomforted but polite, her son Georgie (Cory Michael Smith) who had been a childhood friend of Joe, shows no signs of his trauma but has a manipulative personality. In all of this, Haynes appears to straddle a tone between darkness and levity, grim seriousness and humour, as though always using one to relieve the other. And you are fascinated by how he manages it. It is because there is a cutting sharpness through the movie regardless. Even as Haynes has Portman recite as a monologue a secret letter Gracie wrote to Joe after the incident or plays out a scene in multiple takes to a hammy degree, there remains a very austere undercurrent about the whole process. An intense cynicism towards the way Hollywood exploits sensation, even controversy, and it is incredibly gripping.
The devastating last scene with Joe truly drives this home, as Haynes spells out exactly who we’re meant to care about in all of this. He is the only party who won’t be able to move on from this experience, who has stumbled upon an earth-shattering insight. May December is perhaps the most intelligent, certainly the most striking movie I’ve seen on sexual grooming, and more significantly its after-effects. That it is able to couch this in digestible choices of tone, conscientious satire and Hollywood commentary makes it all the more impressive. Performed fantastically too, it is a movie that in so many respects demands your rapt attention, slyly chastising that effect as it does.
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