'May December': Predators and Prey
Todd Haynes' new film examines dynamics of empowerment and exploitation.
[Spoilers ahead for May December]
May December is not an easy film to explain. It’s got some incredibly funny moments, and it’s also got some utterly heartbreaking ones, and one would think that given the subject matter, there would be no way for these kinds of notes to exist in the same movie. Even its broad logline—actor goes to interview couple who were tabloid fodder 20 years ago—doesn’t really tell you what the film is doing or where its interests lie. But I feel like there are two key moments that perfectly illustrate why May December is so effective, and why I can’t easily shake it.
Predators
Ever since I saw the film a month ago, two scenes in particular have been rattling around in my head. The first scene comes early where Gracie (Julianne Moore) and her husband Joe (Charles Melton) are preparing for the arrival of Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), an actor coming down to their home in Savannah and speak to them as a part of her prep for playing Gracie in an upcoming movie. Grace is a Mary Kay Letourneau figure who first slept with Joe when he was only thirteen and they were both working at a pet store. She had their first child while she was still in prison, and the two are now married with two more children. As a nervous Gracie stares into the refrigerator, she says, “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs,” and then the most dramatic music possible plays—Marcelo Zarvos’ score adapting and re-orchestrating Michel Legrand’s music for the 1971 drama The Go-Between.
It's the first big laugh of the film, and at first blush, it would seem like director Todd Haynes is mocking these characters. Why would you use such a dramatic music cue or such a mundane moment? While some have ascribed Haynes’ approach as “camp,” I feel like that’s a misunderstanding of the term (check out this video I produced for TCM earlier this year for an explainer of what camp entails), as well as what Haynes is doing. Yes, the music cue makes the scene absurd, but really it’s putting us into Gracie’s mind where she seems completely divorced from the serious weight in her life. It’s also a bit of foreshadowing: Elizabeth is coming to Savannah to “understand” Gracie, but Haynes is already clueing us in that trying to get inside Elizabeth’s mind and detangle her motivations only invites further questions. To put it another way: Gracie is now married to a man she met and raped when he was thirteen, and her big concern at the moment is hot dog quantity.
During the course of Elizabeth’s investigation into Gracie’s life and history (and making Elizabeth an actor rather than a journalist is a brilliant choice that I’ll get to in a bit), the picture that emerges is of a woman who felt trapped by her life as a homemaker. She was a wife and mother, and that was as big as her world was allowed to be. While Gracie constructs a new narrative (Joe, who was a friend of her son Georgie, was so mature for his age, etc.), it’s also clear that what she really wanted was a relationship where she would have all the power. The relationship they have now, despite having three kids, is one where Joe longs to escape, but can’t express that desire because he lacks the emotional vocabulary to do so. Joe’s job now is helping to maintain an illusion of domestic bliss for Gracie where she never really did anything wrong, and the world accepts them as a couple even if it means people buying her baked goods out of pity. Gracie’s story seems to be one of a woman who wasn’t looking for liberation as much as ensuring that if she were to be imprisoned, she would be in charge of the confinement.
That desire for power in a limited environment creates a stunning and unexpected symmetry with Elizabeth. The film trusts its audience to know that there’s a power imbalance in almost any industry, and acting is particularly cruel to women and the roles it forces them into. We’re told that a lot of Elizabeth’s fame comes from working in television, so she’s not some Cate Blanchett-type that has always been a revered figure in her profession. Instead, it’s clear she’s looking at Gracie’s story as a way to boost her career, but also relishes the power of being a voyeur who can appropriate Gracie’s life without having to absorb the criminality and shame. Elizabeth loves her perspective as voyeur because she believes that as an actor, she’s somehow above her own investigation. After all, this is just the “research,” that every serious actor does, right? She just wants to get Gracie’s story “right.”
The problem, as the film shows, is that Gracie has spent far more time crafting an image than Elizabeth ever has. Elizabeth’s work isn’t about doing honor to the truth; even the truth between Gracie and Joe is murky at best let alone an outsider who comes to visit for a week. The film lands this point with a particularly dark joke as the final scene shows the irrelevance of Elizabeth’s performance. The director doesn’t care, the crew doesn’t care, and she has to plead for just another take that probably won’t be used in the final cut. The work Elizabeth was doing was to serve her own vanity in an industry that will never give her the same amount of runway or latitude as her male co-stars.
This is where having Portman play the role is brilliant. Portman has been an actor her entire life. Considering that Portman has been a success since her debut performance in The Professional, her understanding of Hollywood and how it treats women is undeniable. Her work in May December is her best since her Oscar-winning turn in Black Swan, and continues a motif you can see through some of her best performances—what if the thing you love is the thing that brings out the darkest elements in you? What’s exciting about Portman is that she plays accomplished people, but she’s always looking for their vulnerabilities, and her turn in May December suits that approach perfectly. Elizabeth’s voyeurism gives her an unearned sense of power, but like Gracie, that yearning for power earns not our empathy but our pity since we know where it comes from. Elizabeth can’t be a big shot in Hollywood, but she can play the big shot in Savannah. For Portman (who also serves as one of May December’s producers), she’s looking at her lifelong profession and the way it cloaks predatory behavior in the name of artistic truth.
Haynes and screenwriter Samy Burch wisely avoid making the film misogynistic by noting the tragedy of both Gracie and Elizabeth’s lives. They walk through worlds that deprive them of power based on their gender, and while there’s nothing commendable about where they choose to find empowerment in the exploitation of others, we can at least feel pity for these women. But oddly, the most pitiable figure in the film is Joe.
Prey
The other scene from May December that has stuck with me is when Joe and his son Charlie (Gabriel Young) are on the roof of their house. Charlie lights up a joint, and asks his father if he’s ever tried it. Joe admits that he never has, and decides to take the joint from his son, coughing heavily after inhaling. Joe then has a bit of a breakdown, and it’s not difficult to see why as it hits us that this moment emphasizes Joe’s loss of childhood. Joe has never had a moment of teenage rebellion. His adolescent and adulthood were taken from him by Gracie. She took a 13-year-old kid who didn’t know any better, didn’t have the maturity to consent to a sexual relationship, and made him a father and husband.
It's no wonder then that Joe’s primary hobby is in tending to butterflies. The butterfly represents what Joe will never have, which is the chance to mature. He harvests the eggs, keeps them in safe environments, and relishes the opportunity to see them blossom. In another story, we would find Joe’s online flirtation with another member of his butterfly Facebook group off-putting, but in the context of the story it’s achingly sad. Gracie clearly has no interest in his hobby, nor does she care to think about why he’s interested in it in the first place. The movie doesn’t applaud Joe’s infidelity, but it also highlights how depressing it is that the most agency he can muster is talking about butterflies with some stranger on the Internet.
Even his act of infidelity when he sleeps with Elizabeth simply feels like he’s being used again. Elizabeth, in her desire to “understand” Gracie, takes advantage of Joe’s stunted maturity. True, at this point Joe is an adult man, but the film has taken the time to let us understand that he’s like a butterfly frozen in its chrysalis. He’ll never get to bloom. In some ways, he’s still that 13-year-old boy who will do what an authority figure tells him to do because the option of refusal never occurs to him. Elizabeth may think of herself as a devoted actor who is now so in the zone that she can channel Gracie, but really what lures Joe to bed is nothing more than a Hollywood gloss and a bit of confidence.
To give his famous co-stars the space to be stars while still retaining the broken heart of the picture is what makes Charles Melton’s performance so incredible. It’s not simply that he has boyish features stacked atop a chiseled frame (a powerful visual to show the disconnect between his adult age and stunted emotional maturity), but that he understands the smallness of Joe in the scheme of the picture. Joe is a victim who, due to a variety of both societal and personal factors, doesn’t get the benefit of being seen as a victim. Gracie may be infamous, but no one is rushing to protect Joe. He’s incredibly alone, and yet he has no way to really express it, which is why he ends up weeping into the arms of his teenage son after they share a joint. Charlie is at the start of a journey of self-discovery and will eventually get to grow up, but that’s not a possibility for Joe. He’s 36 and an empty-nester with a wife who won’t ever let him go. Gracie, Elizabeth, and Joe are all grasping for empowerment, but Joe is the one with nothing to cling to.
Recommendations
Three recommendations this week! First up, it appears The Daily Show really dropped the ball with one of their recent guests. As Dr. Jen Gunter noted on her Substack, The Vajenda, the show not only invited on a quack to talk about childbirth, but didn’t take the time to see he was criminally convicted of having sex with a patient. While it seems like The Daily Show would like to settle in with just a rotating cast of hosts, we’re now seeing the drawback of just letting producers search for people, and hoping for a good dialogue. You need a Jon Stewart or a Trevor Noah to put their mark on the show and serve as a guiding force. A guest host probably doesn’t have the time to prepare, dig down, and really speak intelligently to their interview subject. And sure, that doesn’t matter as much if you have an actor on to promote their latest movie. But if you’re going to examine medical practices, you have to do better, and it’s disappointing that The Daily Show didn’t take a closer look at who they were giving a platform to.
I also recommend this post, “Is Marriage Hard?” from Release the Women. The post dives into Instagram posts of women who talk about how hard marriage is, and that because it is hard, it must therefore be good. While I agree that sometimes difficult things should be rewarding, and that marriages need care and attention, I don’t think they should bring you misery. Author Victoria Ward explores how this dynamic is ingrained, especially in the evangelical church, where women are taught that they need to endure unhappiness because that’s the relationship. But a marriage isn’t like weightlifting where you deplete yourselves to make gains, bro. It’s supposed to be a haven where someone feels loved, safe, and cherished. It would be like if I got a house, and the house was filled with spikes, and then was told that getting repeatedly impaled was how you knew it was a good house.
In a lighter post, my pal Dave Chen went to a poker tournament in Vegas and wrote about it. I absolutely love poker, so of course I never play (it probably doesn’t help that when I have a good hand I start trembling). But Dave’s post was inspiring and made me think I should really give it more attention since it has nothing to do with gambling but simply a mix of patience with luck. Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered what the experience of playing at the World Poker Tour is like, this is a good inside look.
What I’m Watching
Now that Atlanta Film Critics Circle voting has wrapped, I feel a bit more freedom to return to things I want to watch rather than cram in 2023 movies (voting for Southeastern Film Critics Association and Georgia Film Critics is still ahead, but I feel pretty confident that my ballot will stay as it is). For example, yesterday I finally watched the 1961 holiday noir Blast of Silence, which is a nasty bit of work that would pair nicely with David Fincher’s recent film, The Killer. Both films follow hitmen and their internal monologues that show the gulf between how they see themselves and who they actually are.
What I’m Reading
Hanukkah starts tomorrow, and Christmas is still a few weeks away, so you have time to buy one of the best books of the year, Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever. I finished reading Matt Singer’s book last night, and I absolutely loved it. I suppose you could say I’m biased since I’m a film critic reading a book about film critics, but I don’t want to detract from the deftness of Singer’s elegant prose and his deep research into what made Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert a unique pair whose influence is still felt, but whose dynamic (at least in the world of film criticism) has never been successfully replicated. That’s a difficult tightrope to walk, but Singer dances on it. He paints both Siskel and Ebert as incredibly human with their rivalry as something that made each other stronger both as entertainers and as critics. If you have a film fan in your life, you should get them this book.
What I’m Hearing
I recently rewatched Heat, which continues to own. However, it now means this Moby track is on repeat:
What I’m Playing
Still with Super Mario RPG, but I should probably pick up the pace since we’re only about a month away from The Last of Us Part II Remastered.
Excellent!
Excellent review, you captured all the nuances and sensitivities of this film !! Thank you.