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MAY DECEMBER ★★★½
(MA) 118 minutes
As the phrase goes, the premise of the latest film by Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven) is ripped from the headlines. Specifically, the headlines of 1997, when Washington schoolteacher Mary Kay Letourneau was jailed for the second-degree rape of one of her sixth-grade students – who eventually became her second husband, remaining with her for many years.
Natalie Portman (left) and Julianne Moore in May December, which is based on US teacher Mary Kay Letourneau, who was jailed for the second-degree rape of one of her students.
Various films have exploited the lurid side of this material (including the impressively tasteless Adam Sandler comedy That’s My Boy, which I confess to underrating when it came out). The expertly acted May December offers a cooler treatment in every sense, as might be expected from a director like Haynes, who has spent much of his career toying with the codes of melodrama from afar.
Having played numerous desperate housewives over the years, for Haynes and others, Julianne Moore is well within her comfort zone as lisping baker and convicted sex offender Gracie Atherton-Yoo, whose relationship with her much younger husband Joe (Charles Melton) began in the back room of a pet store when he was 13 or thereabouts.
In the present day of 2015, Gracie and Joe are outwardly a couple like any other, living comfortably in suburban Savannah, with their kids about to graduate from high school. The backstory is filled in through the medium of Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a Hollywood star who’s set to play Gracie and wants to learn everything she can for research purposes.
Julianne Moore as Gracie and Charles Melton as Joe in May December.
“It’s the moral grey areas that are interesting,” Elizabeth says rather too breezily to a group of students. But as presented by Haynes and screenwriter Samy Burch, much of the area covered appears black and white: we’re given no reason to doubt what Gracie did to the young Joe stunted his psychological growth, nor that their marriage remains utterly dysfunctional.
As a physically imposing dad in his 30s, Joe retains a hesitant manner more like an adolescent than a grown man – though he’s often obliged to act as a reassuring parent to Gracie, whose brittle chirpiness and private outbursts of distress suggest some form of personality disorder, perhaps rooted in trauma of her own.