With film and TV’s current obsession with retelling familiar stories from a feminist perspective, how do you – and, in fact, can you – draw a line between reclaiming the narrative and dredging up long-buried trauma? It’s a question that plagued Pam & Tommy, Robert Siegel’s divisive series chronicling Tommy Lee’s tumultuous romance with Pamela Anderson (without the latter’s involvement), and it’s one that now concerns Todd Haynes in his brilliant and biting new melodrama, May December.
The love story at its centre is one that has endured decades of scrutiny due to a substantial age gap: Julianne Moore plays Gracie, a baker in her late fifties, who is married to thirty-something Joe (Riverdale’s Charles Melton). You wonder if the judgement she seems to face from her community is the result of misogynistic double standards – but then, you realise that the beginning of their relationship was far more complicated than that. When Gracie was 36, Joe was just 13, and the pair were working together at a pet store when they were caught having sex in the stockroom. Gracie was arrested and later gave birth to their first child while in prison, after which they married and had a set of twins. Selling their wedding photos exclusively to a tabloid helped them to buy a palatial home in Savannah, Georgia, but packages of human excrement are still left on its doorstep by those who want to remind them of their ire.
We learn of the couple’s history through a series of clippings, as they’re being perused by Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a flinty movie star who’s set to play Gracie in an audacious new indie release. She’s visiting the city for research, determined to speak to everyone who was caught up in the scandal, and examine its fallout. When she arrives to meet Gracie and Joe at a barbecue they’re hosting, she’s in giant sunglasses, radiating unapproachability and insisting she wants to capture something real and make Gracie “feel seen”.
It’s clear, almost immediately, that this couldn’t be further from the truth: Elizabeth is simply eager to sink her teeth into her subjects, whatever the consequences. She mines Gracie’s older ex-husband for details; runs into Gracie’s troubled son from her first marriage, once a friend and classmate of Joe’s; and even wheedles her way into the infamous pet store stockroom, where she simulates having sex against the door, her expression gleeful and then euphoric.
She also flirts outrageously with Joe, pries into his childhood, tells him that they’re the same age, and asks him pointedly about becoming an empty nester so early in life (the twins, we learn, are now about to graduate from high school), when she’s only just begun to consider having kids. The effect is destabilising – Joe, who says he remembers little about the start of his affair with Gracie, grows thoughtful and morose, ruminating about the past and wondering what he missed out on by having to assume so many responsibilities as a wide-eyed teen. When he asks to talk about it with Gracie, she, too, spirals out of control. Elizabeth, meanwhile, keeps stirring the pot and observing the chaos, notebook and pen in hand.
What makes May December so juicy, though, is that Elizabeth is not the villain – indeed, no one has the moral high ground. Gracie is emotionally wrought and fragile, but her quiet, long-standing manipulation of Joe is also clear. She chides him just as she does her children; and, when he questions the origins of their love, insists that he was the one to seduce her. “Who was in charge?” she screams, proving, inadvertently, that she always is. In another scene, she tells Elizabeth that people forget that she’s only ever been with two men, while Joe had other lovers before her. “When he was in the seventh grade?” Elizabeth asks, dubious. When the latter then receives tapes from a set of skinny, pre-pubescent actors auditioning to play Joe in the movie, the true horror of his age and inexperience sinks in.
In Melton’s hands, Joe is equally complex. There’s something stunted and boyish about the way he obeys Gracie’s instructions and apologises for every minor misstep, but he isn’t an angel, either: hunched over his phone on the sofa, he appears to be engaging in an emotional affair with a woman closer to his own age, even though he knows that it would destroy Gracie if she ever found out. It’s only when he’s with his kids, who eerily look more like his siblings, that he seems even remotely at ease. He deserves to be as much in the awards conversation as the film’s two Oscar-winning leads, who have all but secured their spots – Moore with her volatile, visceral take on Gracie, and Portman with her preening Elizabeth, who can’t walk past a mirror without stopping to glance into it and mimic Gracie’s body language and the soft lisp with which she speaks.
The off-kilter nature of both performances is crucial to the film’s success, transforming what could, under the gaze of another director, have become a grim and self-important trudge into a fleet-footed romp that is, at points, hysterically funny – almost Almodóvarian in its deployment of dramatic music and soapy revelations. It’s also gorgeously shot, lingering on the hazy sunshine and ominous weeping willows of its stifling Southern setting as the tension continues to rise.
What’s most compelling about May December, however, is that it resists providing easy answers to the thorny questions it poses. The second someone provides a morsel of information that could shed light on Gracie’s behaviour, she undermines it. But, is she lying? It’s confoundingly, thrillingly unclear, and even after almost two hours, you wish you could have more time to cross-examine these beguiling characters. Considering that I saw the film at the very end of a jam-packed day at Cannes, at a delayed screening that didn’t finish until 1:30am, that’s really saying something.
