Today at Film at Lincoln Center, I went to see May December, the new film by Todd Haynes, starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, with the screenplay by Samy Burch. The film is based on the story of the late sexual offender and teacher Mary Kay Letourneau, who assaulted her 13-year old male student, Vili Fualaau in the mid-1990s, became pregnant by him, and married him after she served her prison sentence. They were married from 2005-2019, well into his adulthood with multiple children, until she died in 2020 from cancer.
Her story was made into a 2000 TV movie starring Penelope Ann Miller, Mary Kay Letourneau: All-American Girl, and Haynes' film takes an interesting look into the story, with a fictionalized version of Letourneau as Gracie (Moore), who, decades after the tabloid story and her prison sentence, is living with her former victim/husband Joe (Charles Melton) in a Savannah, Georgia community in 2015, with a college-aged daughter and brother and sister twins who are about to graduate high school. Gracie speaks with a soft lisp, has billowy blonde hair, and mainly bakes pineapple cakes and sells for orders. Joe is 36, but comes off as if he's more like her grown son than her husband, and seems as if his life and having children just happened to him instead of him really feeling like an adult, not fully grasping that Gracie had sexually abused and manipulated him into a life he wasn't ready for, gaslighting him into thinking he was the seducer.
Elizabeth (Portman) is a glamorous TV actress, who is starring in and producing a film about Gracie and Joe, and wants to make a story that depicts her as a more complex character beyond the initial tabloid sensation of her being a sex offender who preyed on a seventh grade boy. She comes to Savannah to meet Gracie and gather research on her motivations and story, as well as interviewing Gracie's current family and her ex-husband and older children from her first family. Gracie greets her with kindness, but often seems to stay a little emotionally remote, giving a polite surface and airy naivete that allows her to deflect any deeper questions Elizabeth may have about the psychology of her relationship with Joe.
Elizabeth can come off as remote herself, more seeming like a beautiful star just dropping in on the normal plebeians, being admired by starstruck teens, and always thinking with one foot out the door, gathering notes on Gracie's community and practicing her mannerisms at home, like her lisp and feathery tone. She acts more like a reporter than like an actress, interviewing people and claiming to want to tell a honest story that shows Gracie as a three dimensional character, but others are wary of her intentions in capitalizing on a tabloid story from the 1990s to try to do a revisionist take that is more in Gracie's favor, despite the trauma that affected Joe, as well as realizing that Gracie is keeping her at arm's length and using her seemingly naïve persona to weaponize against others.
The film will be on Netflix in December, so I don't want to give away too much, but I really liked how this film featured Portman and Moore as complex characters who aren't really likable or sympathetic, both come off as guarded and putting up false fronts, both can be condescending to others (Gracie in telling her daughter that she is "brave" to wear a dress that shows her bare arms, insinuating that she thinks her daughter has fat arms; Elizabeth receiving a compliment from a fan about her show by saying it "means the world to her to hear that," when she in private told Joe she hated the show), both use their own glamour and beauty as a shield against others, and neither is really honest with each other or with others, they both come off as disingenuous and phony. Yet while Elizabeth distances herself from Gracie to try to mimic her voice and facial expressions for the character, she also begins to identify more with Gracie, as feeling like a seductress and manipulator, and being attracted to Joe for his adult beauty with his childlike demeanor.
But both Portman and Moore are fantastic in this film, and do some of their best work in recent years. Moore has had a longtime collaboration with Haynes, with Safe in 1995 and Far From Heaven in 2002. Charles Melton, best known from Riverdale, delivers a thoughtful performance where he looks like a kid in a grown-up body, seemingly confused about how he got to where he is in life, not questioning much and following Gracie's lead from when he was a child, and slowly starts questioning the abuse and manipulation that has ruled his life, and feeling lost, having more of an epiphany about the uncomfortable aspects of his "love" with Gracie for over twenty years. He also raises Monarch butterflies and is fascinated by their metamorphosis process from eggs to larvae to caterpillars to being in chrysalis to being set free as butterflies. The metaphor isn't lost, as he seems mentally stuck as being a shy adolescent boy despite being in his late thirties, and not being able to escape from his past or arrested development.
The film has a musical score by Marcelo Zarvos, adapted from Michel Legrand's music for Joseph Losey's 1971 drama The Go-Between, which plays like a 1950s melodrama score at times, sometimes to comedic effect (haunting piano music with a zoom-up to Gracie at the fridge, then she says, "We don't have enough hot dogs.") The music is a funny contrast that adds camp to the film, as well as heavy music to quiet scenes in a melodramatic way.
I really liked this film a lot, it felt like a mix of being funny and dramatic, about examining how tabloid scandals can still be mined decades later to capitalize on trauma and antiheros, and featuring two female leads as complicated and interesting characters to follow.
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