Chicago Film Festival 2023: May December is Persona for the true crime set

May December. // Courtesy Netflix

From Persona to Mulholland Drive and beyond, stories about women whose roles and identities become enmeshed have endured over decades of cinema. Todd Haynes’ new film May December is a worthy addition to this subgenre. It’s an All About Eve-style satire of Hollywood opportunism whose acerbic dark comedy reads like a culmination of the director’s overarching storytelling interests: melodrama riffs, female character studies, and kaleidoscopic excavation of fame and desire.

The film opens on what initially appears to be a quintessential all-American barbecue. American flags stream as kids dash across a backyard, middle-aged men with jovial dad-bods flip burgers and clink beer bottles while neighborhood ladies gab over appetizers. The only sign that something’s amiss comes when a well-coiffed out-of-towner arrives, only to discover that a literal package of shit has been dumped on the hosts’ doorstep.

This stranger is an actress named Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), who’s risen to fame playing a veterinarian on Norah’s Ark, a fictional show you could easily convince me is currently airing on ABC’s primetime lineup. She hopes her middling stardom will rise to the next level with an upcoming role in an independent film, where she’ll playing the recipient of the aforementioned shit: Gracie (longtime Haynes collaborator Julianne Moore), a lispy Southern Belle whose life bears more than a passing resemblance to Mary Kate Letourneau. Like Letourneau, Gracie was catapulted into the tabloid stratosphere when her sexual relationship with a middle school boy was revealed in the early ‘90s. Her twisted fame grew when she gave birth to his child in prison.

Now it’s 2015, and Gracie has married her now-36-year-old former student, Joe Yoo (Charles Melton). The couple has cashed their daytime talk show checks on a massive lakeside house in their hometown of Tybee Island, Georgia. There they hold onto an acceptable social life with their younger twins (Elizabeth Yu and Gabriel Chung), who are about to graduate high school. Elizabeth arrives to study Gracie before her new movie begins shooting. Joe assures Elizabeth they barely receive doorstep feces anymore.

Of course, Gracie and Joe’s fragile suburban “normalcy” is about to be upended, a fate made abundantly clear when Pedro Almodóvar-esque zooms and Marcelo Zarvos’ pounding score start punctuating otherwise ordinary moments. First-time screenwriter Samy Burch’s script impeccably balances its satire of Hollywood’s true-crime exploitation obsession with the quietly simmering emotional devastation embedded deep in the absurd situation its characters are actually living.

At first blush, Elizabeth is our audience surrogate, presenting herself as a dedicated actress who’s only there to do Gracie’s story justice. However, it quickly becomes clear that she relishes inserting herself into her subject’s scandalous past, no matter what trouble she leaves in her wake. Before long, formal interviews devolve into flirting with Joe and coaxing Gracie into demonstrating her makeup routine while eyeing the older woman’s mannerisms like a hawk.

Lovers of Haynes’ many collaborations with capital-A actresses will be thrilled to know that the delusional dance between Moore and Portman’s characters immediately lands in his growing list of career highlights. Haynes once again puts his spin on Sirkian melodrama (see: Far From Heaven and Carol) while cleverly playing to his lead actresses’ distinct personas. 

Moore takes a page from her long-ago tenure on Days Of Our Lives, modulating Gracie’s swings between soft-spoken naivete and brittle matriarchal manipulation in a way that somehow underlines her monstrousness and earns the most laughs of the entire cast. Portman’s penchant for roles that straddle the line between highly-mannered imitation and dollops of camp (Jackie, Lucy in the Sky) makes her casting feel almost meta at times.

Although plenty of Haynes’ filmography tackles relationships that are wrongfully considered taboo by society, that’s not the case here. For all the bitchy black humor that audiences themselves may be complicit in gobbling up, Melton’s revelatory performance grounds the movie with a deeply human pathos. His Joe is worlds away from the swaggering hunk the actor is known for playing on Riverdale. As a husband facing an empty nest at just 36, there’s a melancholy undertone to Joe’s easy demeanor that reflects how quickly he had to grow up. Yet as his pinched physical performance and childlike sweetness indicate, the coerced young boy he once was still haunts him.

Different forms of media abound in May December: Elizabeth’s tabloid clippings about the scandal, a corny made-for-TV movie about Gracie and Joe’s illicit relationship, an old beauty ad starring Elizabeth that Joe watches, even audition tapes for the film-within-a-film’s young Joe that Elizabeth complains “aren’t sexy enough.” These pieces offer salacious crumbs about the people at the center of this story to the masses, but do little to assuage the miserable self-deceptions all three of them are trapped in day-to-day. 

It’s more than a little ironic that May December is distributed by Netflix, which seems to drop a new distasteful, cobbled-together true crime series every time I remember to open the app. Oh, well—at least subscribers lured in by the film’s juicy premise will be in for a welcome surprise.