The old song says it: “It’s a long, long while from May to December.” As a film about the consequences of long-ago horrific behavior, May December sounds more interesting than it is. As a Todd Haynes project featuring two of Hollywood’s boldest actresses, May December is most surprising in that it’s a male character (and a relative Hollywood newcomer) who largely captures our attention. The premise is intriguing: an older woman (Julianne Moore) once shocked the nation with a series of horrific acts, which involved a sexual relationship with a thirteen-year-old boy, whom she later (following a jail term and the birth of a baby while incarcerated) married. Into her small-town domestic life, some two decades after all this sturm und drang, comes an ambitious young actress (Natalie Portman) who’s planning to star in an indie film in which she portrays the female half of the mismatched couple.
I came into the film curious to see how the two women would evolve, and how one might influence the other. I’m leaving aside here the question of how a radiant performer like Moore could (at 63, though her character must be slightly younger) represent December. In the film, she’s—from start to finish—a happy housewife, doting on her three kids and her hunky (much younger) husband. Any doubts she might have about the unbalanced nature of her marriage to a 36-year-old seem non-existent, from start to finish. The result: I didn’t much enjoy watching her onscreen. It’s only near the very end, when she says something about her troubled older child from a previous marriage that may or may not be true, that I started to wonder if there was more to her character than a placid, rather addled, acceptance of the status quo.
I had wondered, too, if this film might be an exploration of merging identities, somewhat in the way that Bibi Andersson’s and Liv Ullmann’s characters seem to coalesce in Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 Persona. This may be the filmmakers’ goal, but I mostly remember Portman wandering around Moore’s small town, taking notes as she unearths character nuggets from Moore’s screen family and friends. Though, as a buttinsky, she’s treated with a surprising amount of courtesy by everyone she meets, there’s an air of Hollywood fakery about her. This seems confirmed when—late in the film—she turns a moment of compassion into something different, something definitely predatory. And then, at the film’s conclusion, we see her in character, playing Moore’s Gracie in a way that seems to undercut our previous sense that she’s on Gracie’s side.
Writing this, I realize that the film sounds quite provocative. But it’s also infernally slow, scored with doleful music and missing any real spark of life. Both female leads lacked appeal for me; the only character for whom I felt compassion was the young husband (the critically praised Charles Melton), trapped in a domesticity that doesn’t match up with his biological stage in life. He’s the one who has, appropriately, garnered most of the film’s awards this season, for delineating the awkward tension between his character’s role as pater familias and a young man’s restless wish to explore the wider world. Still, his hobby of tending the cocoons of monarch butterflies is so obviously meant to be symbolic of his own personal needs that it quickly becomes irksome.
The story of May December is clearly based on the long-ago case of Mary Kay Letourneau and her much-underage paramour, Vili Fualaau. An L.A, Times columnist notes that Fualaau, still alive at 41, wishes the world would stay away from his tricky story.
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