Top 15 Movies of 2023: No. 8 - May December

8. May December, dir. Todd Haynes

Look, if I'm gonna talk about May December, I need to talk about the most important scene first.

"I don't think we have enough hot dogs..." says Gracie (Julianne Moore) looking into her fridge. The soundtrack blares a melodramatic sting. The camera zooms in, as if this was the most shocking plot twist of the soap opera that is their lives. We cut to an overhead shot of an outdoor BBQ with dozens of uncooked hot dogs on a plate, enough to feed both this outdoor party and probably the entire 101st Airborne Division as well. Considering the circumstances of this family's life, one would expect intense drama in every single decision. Instead, it is just empty fretting, a harmless miscalculation. Everything is normal - even when to outside observers, nothing can be normal. Or it is an instinct to nag, to control, when there's no reason to interfere, to remain the one adult in the family. Maybe these hot dogs really are as awful as we first thought. There's a lot of layers to hot dog politics.

May December is a take on the scandal of Mary Kay Letourneau, a notorious Nineties tabloid story involving Letourneau raping her sixth-grade student, who she eventually married. The whole thing was lurid and horrible, not helped at all by the media frenzy around it. The movie versions are Gracie and her husband Joe (Charles Melton), having been married for decades, they are facing down the prospect of an empty nest. In May December, they are visited by an actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), who is making an indie movie about the case. She gets to get closer to the family and everybody they know in the pretext of "discovering" something profound about the family, and to better imitate Gracie's mannerisms. It is a clever construction, where Elizabeth gets to play detective and uncover the details of this family, while her own motives are questionable. 

May December keeps playing with the sleazy angle "is Elizabeth getting too enraptured in her fantasy?", "is prestige art worth exploiting these people?" while deflating those questions at every turn. We see Elizabeth seemingly in ecstasy as she probes the "scene of the crime", then laughing to herself because in the end, she is an actress and this is play. (And not even a good actress, the lispy accent Natalie Portman puts on to match Julianne Moore is a disaster.)

The real protagonist of May December is not Gracie or Elizabeth, but Joe. That hot dog scene comes just after Gracie has scolded him about too many beers. Their family is picturesque in some ways: nice house in Savannah, Georgia, three shockingly well-adjusted kids, a daughter in college and another about to graduate high school. The daughters even know how to cope against their mother's passive aggressive barbs. But the problem is, while Joe is the center of the family and he's doing all kinds of emotional labor to help Gracie through her depressive episodes, he's not really a father. He's the biggest kid, whose childhood was stolen while he was never allowed to grow up. He sneaks weed with his son, is blind-sided by the idea of casual sex. 

Elizabeth probably ends the movie having learned nothing of significance except surface details. Joe, however, realizes he has been deeply in denial about everything that happened to him.

There's also that interesting tension of exploitation, which May December seems aware of. This movie is one of Netflix's big awards swings for 2023. Todd Haynes is no slouch when it comes to prestige drama directors. Yet this source material is on its face disgusting. Even the characters in May December lament the terrible Lifetime made-for-TV movies made about their lives. Elizabeth struts around like she's making real art and this is her big swing. But where Haynes was smart enough to make a movie about the aftermath of the abuse, not the abuse itself, Elizabeth is not. We have horrible scenes where Elizabeth is looking at young Asian boys' headshots and saying to her director "no, they're not hot enough".

It would be very easy to walk away from a story like this and see Gracie as the predator that she is (she is a hunter, Joe is a nurturer with his butterflies), even under the veneer of suburban pleasantries she has created. However, May December is complicating that further by making its own project feel gross through the eyes of Elizabeth. We end with just a few takes of Elizabeth's movie-within-a-movie, and to answer the question of "is great art worth exploiting and manipulating lives?" The answer is: "no".