Don’t fret, for this is not a spoiler: five seconds into Todd Haynes’ May December, a needle drop of lush strings pulled from a midcentury Michel Legrand score, accompanied by condensed bold sans serif title cards dropping in, confirmed to me that Todd Haynes is about to deliver another masterpiece. After an unexpected career pivot towards a straight environmental/courtroom drama Dark Waters in 2019, Todd Haynes returns to his favorite topic: women. And what more glamorous and dramatic women are there than actresses?
May December is loosely based on the true story of Mary Kay Letourneau, a schoolteacher whose affair with and rape of a sixth-grade student Vili Fualaau rocked tabloids worldwide back in the early 1990s. Letourneau bore Fualaau’s children while in prison and married him once released. While that story alone is sensational enough to make its own movie, Haynes’ ambitions are higher than that of Netflix flavor-of-the-week true crime: enter Elizabeth, a prestigious actress played by Natalie Portman, now shadowing Gracie and Joe’s lives (names changed) in preparation for playing Gracie in an upcoming indie biopic.
Once the actressing element comes into play, we have a movie much richer than a straight take would entail. May December obviously touches on the morality of Gracie and Joe’s relationship, but child rape is so black-and-white that there isn’t much to interrogate. Perhaps that explains why May December’s characterizations remain rather thin for most of the film: in anticipation of the film, I glimpsed one of Letourneau and Fualaau’s uncomfortable interviews, and the movie pretty much copies and pastes their dynamic of a controlling teacher and a helpless schoolboy even decades into their marriage. Instead of Gracie and Joe, the parts of May December that appeal to me concern Elizabeth: May December is a film about the relationship not between Gracie and Joe, but between Elizabeth and her subjects, and ours with spectacle in cinema.
This is most evident in the visual conceit most used by Haynes in this movie: mirrors, us as mirrors, and thus, characters directly looking at us. Haynes’ longtime DP Edward Lachman wasn’t able to shoot this film due to back injury, and Kelly Recihardt’s DP Christopher Blauvelt stepped in. The result is exactly as one might expect from that: a Haynes movie that looks like one by Reichardt, queen of American realist indie slow cinema. In the 2010s setting of Savannah, Georgia, there is no room for swaths of colors in production design and costumes. All there’s left in the cinematography department are the real meat and bones: where to place the camera and how to design the frames. Haynes proves his skill of the highest caliber as he frequently uses lines, divisions, and reflective surfaces to command the audience’s attention and advance the story and themes. When characters stare directly at us in place of mirrors, we are the lens, and the lens is us, so when Elizabeth rehearses a monologue declaring love at the audience-lens-mirror, she’s talking about how much we love her, her work, her star power, despite knowing the immorality of it all, whether it’s the statutory rape of a child, or the artifice and grey areas involved in making a film. May December reveals itself to be about the fallibility of our art form and how loose our craft’s basis is – topics miles away from the premise of a scandalous rape.
And is that primetime TV actress Elizabeth Berry or Oscar-winning movie star Natalie Portman speaking? The benefit of May December’s central story conceit is that so many layers exist merely by initial establishment. Of course, an actress (and May December producer) like Portman, who perhaps finally silences all doubters once and for all here, takes it to the next level: she, along with Haynes, understands camp as a serious art. Don’t worry, she allows us the enjoyable basics: Portman dons the “movie star sunglasses”, struts the catwalk on a pavement, whispers multisyllabic words for no reason other than to mystify: those elements all appear in this prestige drama you weren’t expecting to laugh at, i.e. the best kind of comedy (see Phantom Thread). But they only work because Portman takes camp so seriously (as does Haynes, with those thumping Legrand strings); she doesn’t merely play celebrity as a superficially comedic layer, but as a phenomenon and encyclopedia of bottomless attractions and desire. Perhaps precisely at this ordinary townsfolk setting, Elizabeth is all the more inscrutable, and when Portman switches between Elizabeth’s different personae (all done subtly, no worries), we are even more lost for who the real Elizabeth is, despite Elizabeth’s repeated claims of seeking truth in her little investigation. Yet somehow, Elizabeth is always a coherent character and there is no doubt in the authenticity of such a character existing in real life. Would you really question the authority of Natalie Portman showing you what a movie star is like?
Forming a triumvirate of costars with Portman is Julianne Moore, an Oscar winner in her own right, and Charles Melton, a heartthrob plucked from a CW’s Riverdale and a name most unexpected to be announced for a Todd Haynes movie. Let’s start with Moore: Moore does her Moore thing of crying and doing the Magnolia monologue on a street on command. She is a stalwart not only in Haynes’ filmography but also in delivering actressing gold; she flips between extremities; she is at times a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown and at times delectably villainous. One might even praise the veteran for being so generous as to let Portman have most of the scene-stealing material. Melton, on the other hand, is a curiosity: at times, his verbal outbursts threaten to ruin the movie, but at other times, he displays extraordinary physical embodiment of his character’s predicament, as his father of 3 teenagers physically recoils in shame, insecurity, and inexperience.
How can I exclude the mastermind: despite the loss of his regular DP, composer, production design, and costume designer, May December remains the most Haynesian. Even under Blauvelt’s realist lens, we are not far from Far from Heaven – the third act of May December indulges in shots and camera movements straight out of a 1950s Douglas Sirk melodrama or Haynes’ 2002 explicit replication of one. When the car swivels into the camera, we wonder if we’re watching a Cannes-competing character study or an almost made-for-TV B-movie (and Haynes is too smart not to acknowledge that within the film). Why not both, Haynes asks, when that enriches and deepens your film tenfold? Upon investigation of a few more title cards in the end credits, one notices Haynes is missing from all of the writing credits, but even the metaphors of the script are lifted from shallow overstatedness to neat classicism. The definition of a true auteur is the ability to bring personal obsessions and recurring themes into work originated by others. Haynes doesn’t need flashy publicity to show he might very well be the finest American auteur working today.