Given that they’re both, essentially, voyeurs’ mediums, movies and tabloid journalism have always made for interesting bedfellows. It’s a link that Todd Haynes digs deep into for his electrifying latest effort May December, looking at the inner workings of a scandalous relationship between an older woman and her much younger husband. Funny, eerie, and melodramatic in the classic Haynes style, May December is a dark delight, unafraid to tackle mortally dark subject matter but making you laugh while it does so, with everything brought to life by a trio of phenomenal performances from Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, and Charles Melton.
Portman plays Elizabeth Berry, an actress researching her new role; a biopic of Gracie Atherton (Moore), a woman made infamous by her affair with a seventh-grade boy, to whom she is still married almost 25 years later – this is Joe (Melton), father to three of Gracie’s children, who are all about to head off to college. Visiting Gracie and Joe in their Savannah, Georgia home, Elizabeth’s presence is initially treated as a (somewhat dubious) honour, before becoming something more dangerous for everyone involved as she dives deeper into this sickening relationship and finds that it has a way of infecting and implicating her too.
Initially, Haynes and writer Samy Burch let the awfulness of Gracie simply speak for itself, lending a dark charge to the comedy of manners into which Elizabeth finds herself dropped without saying the quiet part loud (though the hilarious telenovela-style score does do a lot of the work here, first kicking in to accentuate the line ‘we don’t have enough hotdogs’). As it goes on though, the monstrousness becomes more and more explicit, building towards a couple scenes at the end that channel some pure evil through both Moore and Portman.
They’re both as sublime as you’d expect, each perfectly tapped in to Haynes’s heightened tones and earning big laughs in even the tensest scenes, but it’s Melton who makes the most revelatory impression. Previously best known for his work on the famously wackadoo teen soap opera/supernatural mystery series Riverdale, Melton proves his prowess here with aplomb, easily holding his own next to two established superstars. He’s devastatingly sad as a man who’s trying to be normal but simply can’t be, broken and stunted by the entirely unresolved childhood trauma and all-encompassing *wrongness* that underpins the foundations of his whole life, pouring all his energies into raising butterflies and watching old TV shows about homebuilding.
To be as consistently funny as May December is without cheapening the subject matter (or making it feel exploitative) means walking a razor thin tightrope, but Haynes and Burch never put a foot wrong. From guilty laughs, to laughs of discomfort, to some just plain ol’ gags, this sense of humour keeps the film barrelling along at a great pace, culminating in one final, brutal joke that it’d be sacrilege to spoil here. It’s a fine tonal balance that keeps you on your toes throughout, an alertness further heightened by the beautiful but often wilfully disorienting cinematography.
After the misfire of Wonderstruck and the still-great-but-not-particularly-*Haynes*-y Dark Waters, May December is him back in his absolute element, a melodrama of big, poisonous feelings in the sweltering early summer of the American Deep South, fuelled by a magnificently rich script and three unforgettable performances.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 