May December (Haynes, 2023)

Written by Tom Augustine.

Todd Haynes, a director who remains quizzically underrated in spite of having multiple masterpieces to his name, overloads you with signs and omens in the first minutes of May December, telling you everything you need to know about what you’re about to see. Our first images are of caterpillars forming into chrysalises, amidst hazy, humid Southern summer weather. There’s a Fourth of July parade in the picturesque small suburban town where our story is set, in Savannah, Georgia. Already, heavy symbols of rebirth, storytelling and the forging of independence abound. A television actress, Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), arrives at a stately AirBnB, immediately complaining about it’s quaintness on the phone, her carefully curated visage of high-class unflappability pockmarked by her cumbersome luggage and the distinct lack of welcoming committee. Meanwhile, nearby married couple Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton), playact at suburban bliss, preparing to host a party of neighbours. Gracie, blond-haired and clad in cream-colours, toddles around a kitchen and frets about the numbers of hot dogs on hand. Joe tends the barbecue (with about as many hot dogs on hand as you can imagine) as teens cavort on the wharf of their beachfront property. Joe is noticeably younger than Gracie, and Haynes frames the shot with a marksman’s severity: he’s purposefully distanced from this display of youthful joy, mired in the trappings of suffocating, dad-core domesticity.

Elizabeth is in town because she’s playing Gracie in an upcoming movie, as Gracie and Joe have been the source of tabloid frenzy and controversy for some time. When Joe was thirteen, Gracie, the mother of one of his schoolmates, fell pregnant with Joe’s child, and subsequently gave birth while in prison. Since, the two have married and had three children. It’s a salacious story that Elizabeth repeatedly promises to treat with ‘complexity’ and ‘sensitivity’, as she slowly wheedles her way into the sheltered life Gracie and Joe have created for themselves, pulling at threads that threaten the very fabric of their family unit. May December is just the latest foray into Haynes’ career-long conversation with cinematic melodrama, particularly the films of Douglas Sirk in the 1950s, whose works like Imitation of Life and Written on the Wind summarily informed upon Haynes’ films like Carol and especially Far From Heaven. Sirk, a German immigrant whose films were roundly dismissed in the time they were released, only to receive a massive re-evaluation in the decades following, approached melodrama in a way that would set it apart from its conception in the theatre. The video essayist Broey Deschanel explains this in detail in a wonderful piece on May December – detailing how Sirk introduced moral complexity and ambiguity to these kinds of stories, where in earlier forms of melodrama there were clearly defined heroes and villains. The heightened emotions and scandalous material remained, but were now coupled with a socially conscious, even satirical bent, and a kind of fascinating distancing effect, characterised by his highly saturated and artificial set-design. 

In June, Rialto Channel will be playing host to a handful of the very best films of 2023. One of these, the supreme, scalpel-sharp melodrama May December, from master auteur Todd Haynes (Carol, Far From Heaven), may very well be last year’s greatest film.

While Haynes’ film can’t be described in its totality as Sirkian, there’s certainly some element of it in the trace DNA, which allows Haynes to create a work of utmost savagery and purposefulness, a film that plays with irony, but not ironic detachment. The drama of May December is juicy and nasty, but there’s a rock solid core of emotional devastation that becomes impossible to ignore. It is also up-to-the-minute in a way that some may not expect for a genre as old-fashioned as the melodrama. Haynes is deeply interested in the true crime wave of the modern era, and the way it diminishes complex stories into something akin to the tabloids of trashy magazines or TMZ. Everyone Berry meets approaches with caution and trepidation, like an animal being offered a piece of food from a stranger. And rightfully so – though Berry carries herself with an air of empathy and openness, it quickly becomes apparent that hers is a figure of ego and insecurity – and as Gracie says late in the film, ‘insecure people are very dangerous, aren’t they?’ We come to realise that there is a monstrousness to Berry’s character that’s almost as potent as Gracie’s, one which is defined by her sense of inadequacy and desire for artistic glory. Berry hungrily consumes any obvious fodder for her ‘craft’, putting down her own work in the television series that made her famous. Her character is fascinating in that insecurity, the feeling that she’s accustomed herself to a life of transactionality in order to become the great artist she sees herself as – but, crucially, isn’t. The way she looks down her nose at these characters who are her subjects will ultimately be her downfall.

To say it’s Natalie Portman’s best performance is an understatement. She’s been great elsewhere – Heat, Jackie, Black Swan, Leon: The Professional – but I’m not sure she’s ever been as slippery and fascinating as she is here. Portman weaponises the ingénue persona that she’s cultivated her entire career, particularly that thousand-watt smile that here only emerges when she’s caught off-guard, her layers of protective politeness stripped back. It’s yet another stirring performance, too, from Julianne Moore, who plays the most obviously melodramatic, cartoonish role, but slyly finds ways to turn our expectations on their head. Much has been made of Moore’s hilariously exaggerated lisp, but it’s only on repeat watching that I realised just how much the character modulates said lisping in order to keep others around her on the backfoot. She’s a predator whose baby-like affectation is her mode of control. It’s not until the final sequence that Gracie’s mastery of the entire situation is revealed, and it’s all the more disturbing for the time it takes to finally appear. Best, though, is the much buzzed-about Charles Melton, the one-time Riverdale co-star who plays a man not only caught between two frightening, perverse characters, but also one tragically preserved in purgatorial amber, one foot caught in a childhood ripped from his hands and the other in an adulthood forced on him too soon. Melton meets his two formidable co-stars with startling emotional depth, providing May December with its vital, soulful sadness. Witness the way he crumples into himself as he attempts to confront Gracie with decades of repressed anger and trauma, or the way he longingly watches his children cross their high school graduation stage from behind an iron fence. Of all the performances overlooked for awards at the beginning of this year, it is his snubbing that was most egregious.

When Haynes made Safe, also starring Moore, in 1995, he created perhaps the definitive portrait of the suburban nightmare, the way our modern social environment fosters a paradox of intense connectedness and utter isolation. In a sense, May December feels like a cumulation of Haynes’ two most distinct styles – that aforementioned melodrama of Carol and Far From Heaven, and Safe’s clinical dissection of the artificiality of modern life. Haynes’ immaculate craft is only matched here by just how exhilarating his storytelling is – the delicious ironies mounting up, the hilarity of his two leads’ bitchiness slowly giving way to the tragic perspective of Joe, the only character in the film at whom we don’t laugh. Haynes is hardly a prolific filmmaker, so every new, marvelously intricate gem he procures can feel miraculous upon first sight. One of the great pleasures of Haynes’ work, though, is that the glow they first emit rarely dulls on a second or third watch. Instead, one watches and sees new details, encounters fresh questions, ponders ever richer complexities. It’s this mastery that makes May December the finest film of 2023, and one of the very best of this young decade.

May December premieres June 29 at 8:30pm on Rialto Channel.

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