May/December: Mirror, Camera, Persona

Twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, Gracie Atherton-Yu and her husband Joe (twenty-three years her junior) brace themselves for their twins to graduate from high school. When Hollywood actress Elizabeth Berry comes to spend time with the family to better understand Gracie, who she will be playing in a film, family dynamics unravel under the pressure of the outside gaze. Joe, never having processed what happened in his youth, starts to confront the reality of life as an empty-nester at thirty-six. And as Elizabeth and Gracie study each other, the similarities and differences between the two women begin to ebb and flow. Set in picturesque and comfortable Camden, Maine, May December is an exploration of truth, storytelling, and the difficulties (or impossibility) of fully understanding another person.

Review:

In May December a lot of it seems picture perfect. The home is a big beachfront property. The days are filled with hazy light that soften angles and fills faces with an internal heavenly glow. The evenings are velvet and shadowless. The only hint of the gothic plot to come is an overly melodramatic score that intrudes on the quiet moments.

Yet, May December is the story of two woman and their world of lies. One, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) a soap opera actress with bigger thespian aspirations is visiting Gracie (Julianne Moore) as research for an independent movie being made of her life- a life of scandal, full of statutory rape of a preteen, babies being born in prison, a May/December marriage. Some of the community has forgiven Gracie, others continue to show their disgust by regularly delivering boxes of shit to her large waterfront house with the good daylight and velvet shadowless night. They’re at that time in life when the kids will be going to college and they will have to live with each other in the airy empty nest. That’s something Gracie’s husband, Joe (Charles Melton) is looking forward to with dread and unease.

The box of shit is a metaphor for what Joe’s and Gracie’s life will become soon. The director, Todd Haynes will use his three leads, his great sense of narrative, gothic shocks here and there, and a destabilizing sense of play to engage us in this weird story.

Haynes is a director that digs in and twist reality and appearance. He lives for the paradoxes. Women domestic dramas allow him to expose ordinary life, domestic existence with its small moral quandaries and sexual politics as the mess it can be. He toys with genre conventions. He subverts the beautiful happy image being presented with bursts of dramatic music, arch metaphor, floods of melodramatic emotions, to unravel his carefully constructed characters and plots. He aims for an uneasy dissonance. In May December he overlays two movies- the original and the scandal drama that acts as a critique of the original. This doubling creates mirrors and halls of mirrors.

Gracie’s character is loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who in 1997 was arrested for having sex with one of her sixth-grade students, abuse that started when he was 12. She pleaded guilty to child rape and eventually served time in prison, where she gave birth to their first two children. (They later married.)

Gracie rationalizes her relationship with Joe on her own delusional, fragile mentally and emotionally terms. Elizabeth detective playing in the interest of finding character truth and method motivation starts to create doubts about the certainty of Gracie’s and Joe’s love and life together. Elizabeth’s mirroring of Grace’s gestures and expressions is a duplication of what Ingmar Bergman achieved in Persona. Haynes even uses mirrors to show, like Bergman, this co-opting of personalities.

Moore and Portman’s synced performances give May December its gothic texture. Portman functions as the audience guide that shows Gracie’s borderline instability and emotional power plays. She reflects Moore’s need to present a carefully crafted mask to her husband, family and community. Elizabeth’s failure to fully inhabit her character shows her failure as an actress and how much of a dramatic mess the film on Gracie’s life will become.

As for Gracie the audience never knows what is mirror and what is real. She has embraced her role as wife and mother oblivious to what it has cost her husband and children, all the moral crisis birthed from her denial and lack of understanding.

When the focus turns to Joe in the second half May December becomes serious, mournful, almost grieving. Melton’s performance become the understated powerhouse performance that keeps May December from ripping itself apart. Joe is the movie’s emotional weight. Melton must play a man-child in a lunging body, a father, husband, an object of desire, an exoticized other all without masks. He lives and must live in total honesty. He like his butterfly hobby is a chrysalis that’s ready to take flight. Melton gives May December its reflections of greatness.