May December (2023)

Directed by Todd Haynes. Starring Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, Elizabeth Yu, Gabriel Chung, Cory Michael Smith, Piper Curda, D. W. Moffet. [R]

Todd Haynes delivering a periodically overwrought, metafictional psycho-soap sounds more scintillating than it turns out to be, but it warrants attention all the same. In preparation for tackling a biographical role in a film she’s about to start, an actress named Elizabeth (Portman) visits the real-life counterpart to observe and discuss; the person in question is Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Moore), who made headlines many years ago for having sexual relations with her son’s 13-year-old classmate, Joe. More than two decades later, Gracie and the boy (now an adult, played by Charles Melton) are married with three children of their own, but no matter how hard Moore tries to paint her family as happy, well-adjusted, and “normal”, it’s clear she has done significant damage to those she cares for. Working off a script by Samy Burch, Haynes doesn’t quite find an arresting angle on the tabloid aspects of the story or the destructive repercussions (it’s almost too textbook to show the effects of Joe’s grooming, of being deprived of a more organic adolescence, leaving him somewhat dim and childlike), and the presence of the actress (an outsider) in their lives almost feels like a writer’s device to reopen old wounds and expose sad realities. The more interesting portrait is of Portman’s Elizabeth, of actors in general who choose to intimately study the people behind the roles they choose, and deciphering what drew her to this woman, this subject matter. Moore working with Haynes always yields fascinating results (even when the movie as a whole is less-than), and Portman is unsettling with restrained theatricality, but Melton misses the mark—his efforts are hard to get a bead on, evidently confusing immaturity for simplemindedness, and those decisions sometimes rubbed me the wrong way. The super-dramatic piano score, bursting to life with an ostentatious flourish at several junctures, is adapted in part from Michael LeGrand’s music for a 1971 movie called The Go-Between, but it echoes of other sources as diverse as Bernard Herrmann’s Hitchcock collaborations and, yes, even the melody of Eminem’s “The Way I Am”. Lensing is handled by Christopher Blauvelt instead of Haynes’ longtime collaborator, Edward Lachman.

71/100