Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore play actor and subject in May December, the enjoyable tale of a fraught creative collaboration that finally promises more than it delivers. Director Todd Haynes adores playing with the pieces of traditional Hollywood cinema, like a kid with a train set, or his mum’s makeup box, to the point where the artifice becomes the main thrust of his story. If May December is guilty of making hysterical mountains out of molehills, then, this is partly the point. That’s Hollywood movies for you. They turn every crisis into a pre-packaged drama.
Moore co-stars as Gracie Atherton, a 60-year-old southern belle with a sun-bright smile and a brittle coating of frost. More than two decades ago she fell in love with Joe Yoo, a 13-year-old schoolboy, sparking a nationwide scandal that people remember to this day. Portman is Elizabeth, the actor set to play Gracie in the big-budget film of her life. “You look taller on television, but we’re basically the same size,” Gracie marvels, welcoming the star to her seafront Georgia home. Elizabeth agrees: “We’re basically the same.”
Naturally Elizabeth’s job is impersonating other people, but you soon start to wonder if she’s going too method this time. Gracie is now (seemingly happily) married to Joe (Charles Melton), who has grown up to become a handsome, round-shouldered 30-something family man. Elizabeth duly sits Joe down for an interview, but she appears to be channelling the younger version of Gracie. Back in the day, we are told, the lovers were exposed when they were caught in-flagrante in the back of a pet shop – of all the undignified places to be found. Elizabeth visits the spot and prostrates herself in the doorway, simulating sex with a ghost in the name of research.
Haynes’s film – which competes for the Cannes Palme d’Or – sets itself up as a tense chamber piece, a study of merging identities and shifting power dynamics in the manner of Joseph Losey’s The Servant or Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. But May December also comes coloured by the lurid downlight of tabloid culture. It could be a pastiche of a psychological thriller, or a playfully misdirected daytime afternoon soap. Much of the action, for instance, is accompanied by a crashing four-note piano refrain that surely signals imminent disaster were it not for the fact that it’s deployed at the most ostensibly humdrum moments. It lands like a bomb as Elizabeth crosses the street to the community centre. It explodes once again when Gracie pulls open the door to her fridge. “I don’t think we have any hot dogs,” she says.
Inevitably Elizabeth’s research trip stirs up buried resentments, past traumas. It’s possible that Gracie and Joe have spun a self-serving story of their life together – and told it louder and louder so as to drown out the chorus of disapprovaling voices outside. But even self-actualisation has limits. These two could have been creating a fiction all along.
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When shooting her film roles, Elizabeth prefers lots of takes. She insists each take carries her that bit closer to the truth. The evidence, though, suggests the majority of movies are themselves like hot dogs: processed, synthetic and garnished with tasty sauce. Haynes’s drama, to its credit, is aware of the issue and shows its repercussions – the way it reduces the performers and the people they portray – but it’s too knowing and glossy to drive this message home. Elizabeth’s ridiculous film-within-a-film is surely bound to miss its mark. For all its relish and abandon, I fear that May December does too.