Todd Haynes loves Douglas Sirk but with May December he takes on a love-across-the-divide tale even Sirk might struggle with.
The story is loosely based on the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal, the case of a 34-year-old teacher and her inappropriate sexual relationship with a 12-year-old boy. In this retelling, the teacher was the 36-year-old Gracie and the boy the 13-year-old Joe, a couple who met in a pet store where she helped out and he did odd jobs, and where the two of them were one day discovered in flagrante in the store room.
But that was all 20 years in the past. As Haynes picks up the story the scandal is all but forgotten, though boxes of shit do still keep turning up on the doorstep now and again – not so much billets doux from the local community as billets poo. Gracie did time in jail but that is also now long in the past. Gracie and Joe are still together, the much loved pillar of the community and her doting young husband. There are smiling, happy kids as proof of their union and a lovely home, where she bakes cakes and everything is super dandy.
In Haynes’s curtain-up moment, along comes Elizabeth, an actor doing detailed background research to help get to the “truth” of the woman and the relationship. Elizabeth is going to play Gracie in an upcoming movie but we never discover whether Gracie has invited Elizabeth into her home because money has been dangled, but she is warm and welcoming, talking to the actor at length and inviting her to family barbecues, meals and, eventually, the graduation of a couple of her kids.
Maybe Gracie is obeying the old adage of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. Either way the thespian, in effect, turns sleuth, talking to those connected to the scandal – Gracie’s ex husband, the owner of the infamous pet shop, the lawyer who defended her, Gracie’s estranged son with husband number one. And as she goes, and starts to exhume the past, a darker side is revealed, and a complex psychological portrait is painted, of Gracie, of Joe and of the relationship the two of them have.
Significantly, Joe is now a strapping handsome man in the full flower of manhood, and Gracie is post-menopausal. Also significantly, Joe and Elizabeth are about the same age, 36, the age Gracie was when she seduced (she’d dispute the term) the boy.
Is Joe in Gracie’s thrall? Is she, possibly, in his? Haynes works away at that knot, suggesting Gracie is on the gaslighting spectrum at one point, that she’s psychologically damaged at another, was possibly sexually abused as a child herself, layering on mitigations and justifications, explanations and excuses, muddying and complicating the picture. Joe keeps caterpillars, not only a sign of a man stuck as a boy, but a metaphor – they pupate and eventually become butterflies. Will Joe?
Haynes has said that there is Bergman’s Persona in this movie and you can see traces of that as the two women talk to each other and Elizabeth starts to try and work her way into Gracie’s character. The fact that Gracie is played by Julianne Moore and Elizabeth is played by Natalie Portman, while Joe is played by the far less well known Charles Melton, throws the emphasis on the women.
Melton keeps his end up, commendably, but Joe is not really who the film is about. It’s hard in any case for Melton to compete with Portman when she starts her tentative exploration of Gracie’s physicality and does it by aping Moore’s acting tics, which provides the movie with some much needed humour.
Douglas Sirk might recognise the situation, since he was always dealing with inappropriate or taboo relationships – a man for the woman whose husband he killed in Magnificent Obsession, a rich woman for a gardener in All That Heaven Allows – but while Haynes pumps up the melodrama with his choice of score (Michel Legrand’s piano-driven score for The Go-Between, as re-interpreted by Marcelo Zarvos), he doesn’t do the same with the visuals.
Stark, rich Sirkian colours are not in evidence. In fact Christopher Blauvelt’s cinematography is positively gauzy. Sirk’s palette made bold challenges to the transgressions he portrayed. Haynes, on the other hand, is far less certain.
May December – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
