A film review by Craig J. Koban December 20, 2023

MAY DECEMBER

2023, R, 118 mins.

Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry  /  Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo  /  Charles Melton as Joe Yoo  /  Gabriel Chung as Charlie Atherton-Yoo  /  Elizabeth Yu as Mary Atherton-Yoo  /  Piper Curda as Honor Atherton-Yoo  /  Cory Michael Smith as Georgie Atherton  /  D.W. Moffett as Tom Atherton  /  Chris Tenzis as Aaron  /  Kelvin Han Yee as Joe Yoo Sr.  /  Andrea Frankle as Rhonda  /  Joan Reilly as Lydia

ORIGINAL FILM

Writer/director Todd Haynes' MAY DECEMBER makes for a highly uncomfortable watch.

Creatively, it's an ambitious work, if not more than a bit questionable and a tad undisciplined.   

His film is based loosely on the Mary Kay Letourneau 1990s scandal.  She was - at the time - a thirtysomething teacher that slept with her 12-year-old student, went to prison for it, mothered his child while incarcerated, and then married him when she was released when he was an adult.  Haynes tries to maneuver on a very shaky tonal high wire act here of marrying high camp, sobering human drama, and lurid and sickening sensationalism.  Sometimes, MAY DECEMBER is heartbreaking to endure, whereas other times it's almost too absurd in its wry social humor for its own good.  

I'm still not entirely sure - even days after streaming of it (the film hit Netflix after a limited theatrical engagement) - whether I either admired its choices or was sickened by its very premise.  To be fair, it tackles issues of statutory rape, grooming of minors, and a marriage based upon that...and it often tries to do so with cringe humor.  MAY DECEMBER is disturbing, to say the least.  I don't think that it achieves the balance it's looking for, but it thoroughly got under my skin, and Haynes' cold and detached directorial precision here merits a look.  

There's yet another whole undercurrent to the film in terms of its exploration of the film/TV industry, method acting and those that use it being so hopelessly wrapped up in unhealthy self-absorption for a part.  One of those very actors is Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), who - in the film's opening - journeys to Savannah, Georgia to visit and research Gracie Atherton-Yoo, who she's about to portray in an upcoming movie.  Despite the outward veil of relative normalcy that her family exudes, a dark back history severely taints them.  When Gracie was in her thirties she started a scandalous relationship with a sixth grader while working at a local pet shop, Joe Yoo, who was also a BFF of her own son, Georgie.  Caught after committing statutory rape, Gracie went to prison and - while there - gave birth to Joe's son.  This wretched story became the stuff of tabloid journalism legend, and Gracie went on to become a notoriously well known sex offender.  When she got out of prison, Joe married her (played as an adult by Charles Melton).  Decades passed and the couple - now in their sixties and thirties respectively - seem to have found some semblance of peace together despite everything that built up to it.

So, this certified sex offender and now married mother is spending her days looking after her family, making ends meet as a local baker, and is now prepping for the high school graduation of her twin children, Mary (Elizabeth Yu) and Charlie (Gabriel Chung).  This pair was fathered by Joe after he fathered his first child in Honor (Piper Curda), who's already attending university.  To say that this family is a complicated one is a vast understatement, but this is precisely where Elizabeth comes in.  She's so dogged in her obsession to portray Gracie with the utmost realism on screen that she feels the need to infuse herself in her family and meticulously research what makes her - and her clan - truly tick.  Miraculously, Gracie seems mostly open to this idea and allows Elizabeth to hang out with the entire family - and dig into the local townsfolk - to get as broad of a picture as possible to make her upcoming performance ring with immediacy and verisimilitude.  As Elizabeth entrenches herself deeper into this family unit, she begins to see cracks and fissures in it, especially with Joe, who perhaps never got over having virtually no normal childhood or adolescence because of what Gracie did to him.  Gracie, on the other hand, tries to portray an outward facade of tranquility, but deep down she's riddled with anxiety about her past and present.  

What perhaps works the best in MAY DECEMBER are the scenes of Elizabeth tackling her subject with the meticulous eye of a detective.  She's literally like an in-the-field journalist asking deeply personal questions, probing for hard-to-find answers, and even going as far as to find out (for example) what kind of foundation Gracie puts on her face and what all the locals think about her and Joe's unsavory union and marriage.  Elizabeth is not some innocent persona in MAY DECEMBER.  She doesn't want to simply play Gracie in a throwaway, paycheck-grabbing manner.  She wants to become her...in every way possible.  This requires deep and penetrating interviews with everyone in and outside this family, including Gracie's ex-husband and a lawyer who oversaw her case, not to mention her first son Georgie (Michael Smith), who's now a musician.  Hell, Elizabeth even visits the pet store that Gracie worked at where she met and later seduced Joe and finds - shall we say - a twisted way of preparing for her deep-dive immersion in playing her.  It should be noted that Samy Burch's script here is less concerned with making judgment calls on Gracie and her family and doesn't go out of its way to go into every salacious detail of Gracie's horrible crimes.  Instead, MAY DECEMBER is more fascinated with Elizabeth's unquenchable thirst to commit herself to playing this woman, which takes a whole different kind of dark path for her too.

That's not to say that Gracie and Joe are delegated to the sidelines here.  Far from it.  Haynes fosters an udulating aura of deep unease throughout the film as he navigates through the headspaces of multiple characters that - in their own unique ways - are manipulators.  Gracie is given ample screen time here, and even though she seems happy and content with Joe (and he reciprocates said feelings), there's no question that she still casts a deep shadow of influence over him, often talking down to him or giving him orders as if he's another child and not an equal spouse.  Again, the film is less interested in understanding why Gracie did what she did to Joe; it's honed in on the now and how this family operates in the present with all things that have transpired before.  Joe himself is arguably the most interesting character.  He loves Gracie and his steadfastly devoted to her, but he also hides many of his inner pains and psychological scars in how he went from boyhood to manhood in an instant and in the least proper way possible.  Adding a destabilizing influence to his life is the appearance of Elizabeth, who's constant probing brings so much pain from the past back to the forefront.  In many ways, Gracie is a domineering, control-freak groomer of Joe and now Elizabeth is mirroring that with her method-acting pathos.   

No more is this true in the film's more haunting scenes that involve Gracie and Elizabeth in front of mirrors and later staring in front of each other, and we begin to witness the inherent madness of Elizabeth's whole plan to become this woman.  It's chilling because Gracie is, yes, a criminal predator and Elizabeth is slowly becoming a similar kind of predator.  She tries to copy Gracie's hand gestures, vocal cadence, fashion and makeup choices...and so on and so on.  You can also tell that Elizabeth is mentally slipping and really becoming a conniving disrupter when she fields questions from a class of high school students about how to film intimacy and sex scenes...and proceeds to give a very unsuitable answer to them.  Portman is superb at playing this woman's warped sense of professional entitlement while engaging in some ethically alarming choices to research this family.  She's perfectly matched by Moore, who's no stranger whatsoever to playing unhinged personas.  She has a trickier acting challenge when compared to her co-star in the sense that she's playing the role of a cold and vile sex offender who is also trying to be a normal mother and wife (if that is even possible).  You can really sense the tension that exists between Gracie and Elizabeth throughout the film, even when it's not explicitly pronounced, which is a testament to how powerful both actresses are her together on screen.

MAY DECEMBER wholeheartedly belongs to Melton, though, who easily plays the most damaged and sympathetic character in the entire film.  Joe's entire arc is that - deep down - he never really emotionally moved on from having his childhood robbed of him by Gracie.  He's the product of a sick union and is now impossibly trapped within it, with his only sense of escape being his butterfly collection and experimenting with drugs.  And he gets far too cozy with Elizabeth's meddling influence for his own good, which adds another damning layer of being completely domineered by people that profess to mean well, but essentially are incapable of projecting a truly caring influence.  Melton's performance is carefully modulated throughout and at first he's so understated that I feared that he would be reduced to the sidelines of this film, but he's certainly giving his own as the layers of the story start to unravel and we learn the depth of this person's sadness.  He begins to learn how his whole existence has been ruthlessly tampered with by two women with revolting motives.  How utterly tragic.