May December

 Todd Haynes May December (Netflix 2023) is a mysterious and open-ended film about statutory rape and its emotional consequences.  The subject matter is highly fraught, TV movie-of-the-month material, but Haynes adopts a rigorously abstract and, even, nonchalant  approachwith respect to this melodramatic material.  As a result an audience expecting a certain kind of movie, espousing something like conventional morality, may feel that the picture is too neutral and indifferent to do justice to the material -- the viewer may feel a bit cheated by the movie's scrupulously non-judgmental perspective.  The picture requires us to make up our own minds about the conduct of the characters and, if you expect to be guided to insights about sexual exploitation and its long shadow, you will be put-off by this film.  In fact, it is arguable that the statutory rape aspects of the story, events occurring 24 years before the action shown in the movie, are not May December's real theme -- rather, the picture seems primarily about acting, truth in cinematic representation, and the way that time doesn't exactly heal, but eliminates and polishes away sharp edges.

A 36-year old actress, famous for a TV show in which she plays a perky lady veterinarian, comes to an island suburb of Savannah, Georgia.  (For some reason, the picture is set in 2015).  This actress, named Elizabeth (played by Natalie Portman) is researching a part that she will play in an upcoming film.  This movie is about events that happened between 1992 and 1994, a story that captivated the country and that was heavily reported in the tabloid press at the time.  (The story has already been featured in a TV movie, but the production featuring Elizabeth seems to be higher prestige, more up-scale version helmed by an Italian director. Apparently, Elizabeth is having a casual affair with this man.)  The film within the film, a docu-drama, is about a happily married Savannah housewife, Gracie (played by Julianne Moore) who embarked on a fatal love affair with a seventh-grade boy.  The couple were discovered in flagrante at the pet store where the woman worked and where the seventh-grader was also employed.  Gracie was sent to prison for statutory rape where she delivered the couple's child, a girl named Honor who is now attending college. After being released from prison, Gracie and the boy, Joe, who was, then, an adult, were married.  When December May begins the couple have been together for 24 years and are living a nondescript, more or less, anonymous life on the suburban island near Savannah.  Joe is Korean American and, although appreciably younger than Gracie, now seems a bit paunchy, disenchanted, and in fact, now is plausible as her husband.  The couple have twins, a boy and girl, who are about to graduate from High School and leave for college.  Gracie has another son, who is disaffected and possibly mentally ill, with her first husband Tom Atherton, the man who she abandoned for the seventh-grader.  The film shows Gracie as a conventional housewife, concerned with appearances, obsessed with dieting and health, and indistinguishable in all respects from her neighbors who have now chosen to forget, or, at least, ignore the scandal from which the second marriage arose.  Periodically, boxes of shit are mailed to Gracie by anonymous enemies, but she takes this all in stride and seems proud to now be an exemplar of traditional values, someone who dotes on her children, henpecks poor Joe, and makes money selling elaborate baked goods out of her house.  (Joe is a radiologist).  Elizabeth, who in some ways is more troubled than Gracie, interacts with the older woman and tries to understand her motivations -- she interviews Gracie's previous husband, her lawyer, and interacts with Gracie's angry and abrasive son from her first marriage, a handsome young man who has defined himself as the primary victim of Gracie's affair with the seventh-grader.  Elizabeth tentatively acts out a few episodes from the scandalous love affair -- for instance, she seems to masturbate in the pet shop where the lovers were discovered and, at the climax of the movie, recites an agonizing letter that Gracie wrote to her teenage boyfriend, acting the part of Gracie.  (Joe has kept this letter, evidence of Gracie's previous criminal conduct, and, in a breach of faith with his wife, gives the souvenir to the actress.)  Elizabeth, it seems, is a sort of victim of method-acting and her own identity is a little unstable.  As the film progresses, she seems to become more and more similar to Gracie as she was when the scandal arose, more impulsive, more willing to take erotic risks and more confused about her own identity.  Whereas Gracie seems never to have had any second thoughts about her erotic adventure with Joe and continues to justify it -- "you seduced me," she tells Joe in one particularly painful scene -- Elizabeth is a bundle of neuroses and is unable to let go of the part that she is playing.  We see this in a puzzling final scene, an episode from the movie in production, shot on a set simulating the pet shop and, in which Elizabeth as Gracie, tries to seduce the boy -- she is fondling a snake but says that the snake doesn't bite adding "it's not that kind of snake."  Even after the director has called "cut" and accepted her performance after four takes, Elizabeth wants to keep performing the role, wants to continue her on-screen seduction of the little boy.  

Of course, beneath the surface of conventional suburban morality, there is a seething subcurrent of wounded feelings and emotional damage.  Elizabeth capitalizes on Joe's sense that he was deprived of his adolescence by seducing him -- there's a cringe-inducing scene of sex on a bedroom floor in which Elizabeth, as it were, test-drives poor Joe.  It's obvious that Joe is sexually inexperienced and doesn't know what to make of the lightning-fast intercourse.  He seems trapped in a seventh-grade approach to sex.  After the encounter, Elizabeth rather coldly tells Joe that nothing will come of their dalliance, a meaningless interlude as far as she is concerned,  because "that's what it means to be an adult" -- that is to take your pleasure and move on without second-thoughts.  This is baffling to Joe whose entire life has been defined by his sexual encounter with Gracie.  He goes back home and tries to talk to Gracie, but she won't listen to him; Gracie is so convinced of her rectitude and the purity of her desire for Joe (someone she now merely tolerates) that she doesn't want to hear anything about his feelings, portrays him as the aggressor in their fatal love affair, and has completely walled herself off from her husband.  Gracie and Joe's children graduate from High School.  Gracie, who is from Appalachia, hunts in the woods with her two beautiful Golden Retrievers -- she sees a fox but doesn't take a shot at the animal, although the beast somewhat plaintively cries out to her -- and, then, reverts to her smug somewhat self-satisfied life as Joe's pampered wife.  At the end of the movie, just before we see Elizabeth reenacting the pet shop scene with Joe, Gracie tells the younger woman that her oldest son's bitter charge that she was victim of childhood incest with her brothers in Tennessee is a complete fiction.  Elizabeth is amazed that Gracie knows that the young man made this claim to her.  Gracie says that she talks to her oldest son "every single day" and knows exactly what he is doing -- an assertion that surprises Elizabeth since everyone has told her (apparently inaccurately) that Gracie is entirely estranged from her son with her first husband and has no contact with him at all.  The point seems to be that what we think we know about people is mostly untrue. 

The viewer, of course, aware of  the criminal backdrop to Gracie and Joe's marriage scrutinizes the film for clues of dysfunction arising from the statutory rape.  But. by and large, Grace and Joe, like the rest of the community, have more or less agreed to bury the past and avoid referring to it.  (Joe is stunted, a sort of man-child -- in one scene, he smokes marijuana with his son on the roof of the house, the place where the teenagers hang out to get away from their parents; he says that he's never used marijuana before -- this was an experience denied to him by his teenage affair with the controlling Gracie.) From time to time, Gracie seems inexplicably emotional; for instance, she cries uncontrollably when a customer rejects one of her cakes and won't pay for it -- but we don't know whether this has anything to do with the love affair 24 years earlier or, if this is just a red herring, a clue that leads nowhere like the assertion by Gracie's son that her brothers sexually abused her back in Tennessee. Most of the film is enigmatic; it's not exactly clear whether Haynes, the director, has unresolved feelings himself about the subject matter and can't really come to any sort of dramatic conclusion on that subject or whether his reticence is intentional, a strategy emphasizing how little we know about human motivations and their consequences.  In one scene, Elizabeth, who is a celebrity, is invited to the High School where Gracie's twins attend school.  She gives a talk on acting.  One of the boys taunts her and Elizabeth responds with some obviously seductive intent directed at the teenager.  The question is about how the actress feels when performing sex scenes.  She replies that it takes six hours to film a scene of that sort, that you are mostly nude, rubbing up against an actor, and that, in the end, you aren't sure whether you are acting as if you feel desire and pleasure or acting to conceal the real desire and pleasure that the performance induces in you.  In some scenes, for instance, a sequence in which Gracie applies make-up to Elizabeth, the camerawork channels Bergman's great Persona, a picture also set on an island that explores some of the same themes implicit in May December; Bergman's rather stylized and cubist framing of his two actresses is echoed by the way that Haynes films Gracie and Elizabeth -- of course, the concept is that they are exchanging personalities.  Joe is obviously detached from Gracie, who mercilessly orders him around, and he is pursuing a sort of desultory long-distance flirtation with a woman in his Facebook group.  (Joe cultivates Monarch butterflies and the movie features many close shots of caterpillars and chrysalises and the butterflies emerging from their cocoons -- the metaphor seems to be that Joe was never allowed to transition from being a child to adulthood and that the transformation of the insects is symbolic of growth that was denied to him.)  The interaction with the Facebook friend goes nowhere and, at the end of the movie, one has the sense that everyone, including Elizabeth, is trapped in a sort of paralysis, unable to either acknowledge or escape the past.  This sense of paralysis is embodied in the film's hyper-dramatic sound track, piano music composed for Joseph Losey's film The Go-Between.  The score by Michel LeGrand is used idiosyncratically, sometimes for laughs -- in one scene, Gracie notices that the family doesn't have enough hot dogs for their barbecue, a realization underlined by a burst of wildly emotional and hyperbolic music, dramatic crashing chords on the piano.  December May is elliptical and evasive, but it's an excellent movie and worth your time.