May December : The Crashing of Symbols

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. 

 

Wondering about the Sounds of Silence in “Wonderstruck”

I must say: I wasn’t entirely struck by Wonderstruck. I’ve admired a lot of the work of director Todd Haynes, whose sensitivity and indie sensibilities appeal to me greatly.  And I knew the screenplay was written by Brian Selznick, adapting his own quirky juvenile novel as he had done for the spectacular Hugo. Add in a performance by Haynes favorite Julianne Moore, as well as a suitably eclectic score by the talented Carter Burwell, and you would seem to have something pretty special indeed.   

Wonderstruck is certainly unique in its conception. It tells what seem to be two separate stories from two separate eras. One, set in 1977, involves a twelve-year-old Minnesota boy, grieving the loss of his mother and his hearing, who travels to New York City in search of the father he’s never known. The other, taking place fifty years earlier, features a young deaf girl who runs away from her affluent Hoboken home to seek out a glamorous Hollywood star about to open on Broadway.

The stories collide—in their fashion—at the New York Museum of Natural History, where an historic exhibit of old curiosity cabinets (the forerunners of today’s museums) creates some creative linkage between them. But it’s not until the film’s final moments that we understand the full connection between the two young lives being explored. Haynes shot the 1977 scenes in color and the 1927 scenes in classic black-&-white, moving gracefully between the two. So much to admire, but I admit I for one often got restless, especially where the young boy’s tale of woe was concerned.

 But that 1927 storyline had me riveted. Partly that was thanks to the dynamic, though non-speaking, performance of Millicent Simmonds, appearing in her first film. Simmonds, who has been deaf since infancy, has an open, appealing face that beautifully captures the emotions of her character. One particularly poignant moment: leaving a movie theatre where she has just thrilled to the dramatic escapades of silent star Lillian Mayhew, she pauses wistfully beneath the marquee which proclaims that the theatre will soon be closed for the installation of a sound system, so that future audiences can enjoy talkies.  It’s a moment that instantly captures the isolation of a deaf girl who has never been exposed to American Sign Language. Kudos to director Haynes for insisting that an actual deaf child play this role.

The first time I paid attention to the plight of the deaf was watching the stage version of Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God. In 1986 the play became a movie, and its hearing-impaired star, Marlee Matlin, ultimately won a Best Actress Oscar for her role as an angry young deaf woman who refuses to attempt verbal speech. This was her first film, but the Oscar wasn’t granted to her solely out of sympathy for her affliction. I’m happy to report that she’s had a lot of film and television roles since, mostly playing women who just happen to be deaf but also enjoy many other distinctive character traits.

Here’s hoping the incandescent young Millicent Simmonds will have an equally fulfilling career trajectory. This year she was featured as the hearing-impaired daughter who is central to John Krasinksi’s effective thriller, A Quiet Place, and other roles are on tap. A kid from small-town Utah who was dazzled by her first visit to Manhattan, Millie is loving the excitement. So far she’s exuberant and fearless about the new direction her life is taking: “I want to be an actor to show deaf people can do it. You're not too young to dream big!”

"Carol": Bringing a Fantasy to Life

Though I admire Todd Haynes’ carefully modulated brand of filmmaking, I can’t say that I’m a big fan of his current film, Carol. Frankly, although I thought the two central characters in this Lesbian love story were absolutely beautiful to look at, I found myself not all that interested in their passion. Perhaps that shows the limitations of my own sexuality. Listening to a Fresh Air interview with Haynes and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy (who has just been nominated for a Writers’ Guild award for her adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel), I realized that they are part of a world I have personally not entered.

Patricia Highsmith, as readers of her fiction are well aware, was best known for psychological thrillers marked by a homoerotic subtext. Her Strangers on a Train was adapted into one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best works, and her Ripley novels have been filmed many times, notably in 1999’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, with Matt Damon in the title role. Curiously, Highsmith was a gay woman who vastly preferred the company of men. But she had an experience as a young shop clerk that led directly into the writing of the pseudonymous novel The Price of Salt, from which Carol is adapted.

It seems Highsmith was working at Bloomingdale’s, trying to earn money to finance her sessions with a therapist. Suddenly she looked up and noticed a customer, whom she later described as “a Hitchcock blonde with a heart of ice.” Absolutely nothing happened. But she replicated the scene, in a sense, when writing The Price of Salt, turning herself into the innocent young woman (played by Rooney Mara in the film) who encounters the love of her life when the elegant Carol comes up to her department store sales counter to buy a Christmas gift.  

This fascinating anecdote comes from Phyllis Nagy, who met and befriended a much older Highsmith (by then a famous author) when she was a very young woman in a lowly position at the New York Times. The fact that Nagy is also gay might seem like the source of a natural bond between the two women. But the truth is slightly more complicated. Highsmith at that point in her life was known for aggressively chasing after younger women. One day, when she and Nagy were lunching, she pulled out an old-fashioned wallet and unfurled a series of plastic photo-sleeves. Each one contained a shot of a young woman in skimpy S&M style attire (Nagy compares these photos to Charlotte Rampling’s wardrobe in The Night Porter). Highsmith queried, “I don’t suppose? . . .”  But it was plain to both of them that Nagy was definitely not the type. They were, and remained, simply friends.

As a gay woman, Nagy was determined to get at the truth of love between females in her Carol screenplay. She didn’t want to show anyone wallowing in guilt; she did want to show real conversation between women in love. As a gay man, Todd Haynes respected her script and brought to it his own feelings about passion. For whatever reason, the connection between Carol and Therese just didn’t strike me as terribly interesting. (I did not feel the same way about the two male lovers in Brokeback Mountain. Maybe an analyst could explain why.)

At any rate, I love the story about Highsmith turning a very brief encounter into a fantasy, then making it a novel. Curiously, the same thing happened to a young man named Charles Webb. He saw a sexy older woman playing cards in his parents’ living room. Then he wrote The Graduate.