Reviewing movies for a while now, I’ve heard a lot of interviews about actors describing their “process.” Generally my eyes start to glaze over as that conversation continues. Todd Haynes listened though, and May December is his reminder of the depths these actors will go to in order to find the “truth” in their performances. I really hope my life never warrants a TV show or movie after watching this creepy affair.
About 20ish years ago, Gracie Atherton (Julianne Moore) had a Mary Kay Letourneau like tabloid romance with teenage Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), gripping the nation. After a jail sentence and years out of the spotlight, the two are happily married (she’s in her 50s ish, him in his mid 30s) with twins about to go to college. It’s at this time Hollywood is ready for a movie, and sends lead actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) to spend time with the Yoo family to prepare for her role. Elizabeth for the next few months, notebook in hand, learns about this family so she can do her best to find the “truth” in Gracie’s life onscreen.
When I first heard this was a Mary Kay Letourneau story, I thought Todd Haynes would go for more of a sinister thriller vibe. Instead, he has bigger fish to fry: Hollywood fish. The true crime explosion has made audiences hungry for more content all the time. As such, a one off podcast has turned into an invasive species of the media machine, with the flawed humans that did the true crime forced to constantly relive their worst moments over and over again. Haynes’s direction is pitch black delight: he puts ominous piano music from a Lifetime Original movie behind Gracie and Joe as they do benign things in their house. I cackled with glee as the piano hits a climax and Gracie proclaims, looking in the fridge, “uh, we’re out of hot dogs.” And that’s the point. Gracie and Joe aren’t sinister serial criminals planning their next evil action: they’re just a boring married couple living their life. But for Elizabeth, that sucks, because she clearly comes to this research with ideas of who these people are, constantly undercut by their straightforward, boring answers to what she believes to be deep, introspective questions. The “truth” is pretty mediocre to the actress…but she’s got a movie to make, so she prods and prods until the Yoos give her what she wants in her head. The truth the way Elizabeth sees it.
Elizabeth’s prodding is where the darkness Haynes lays the wicked groundwork for in the first hour start to consume the Yoos. These people are pretty happy now, content to go about their day to day lives in peace. But Elizabeth needs more and more from them, transporting them back in time and forcing the family to relive those moments, over and over again. In Minority Report, Tim Blake Nelson’s character said “when you dig up the past, all you get is dirty.” And that’s what starts to happen here. Elizabeth’s research forces Joe to really think about his past in earnest. Gracie gets more and more irritated with Elizabeth’s presence, like an itch she can’t really scratch to get rid of. And then there’s the wonderfully weird Natalie Portman. She finds a performance even creepier than Black Swan, as she transforms boring married life into a Lifetime Original masterpiece of her own making. Elizabeth is so on another wavelength than the other people that she thinks high schoolers will understand her twisted Hollywood take on sex scenes in movies, as they cringe in horror at what she says. She’s the Hollywood machine as a person, bending and shapeshifting to get the best story possible, truth be damned.
Haynes also finds the perfect ending for May December, as we get glimpses of Elizabeth on the movie set. The lesson as always for Hollywood: never let truth get in the way of a great story. I would widen that phrase a bit myself. Never let truth, feelings, cruelty, obsession, and innocent people get in the way of a good story. Or at least a monetizable story. That’s the real truth.