REVIEW: May December [2023]

Rating: R | Runtime: 117 minutes
Release Date: November 17th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Netflix
Director(s): Todd Haynes
Writer(s): Samy Burch / Samy Burch & Alex Mechanik (story)

I don’t think we have enough hot dogs.

The funniest part of Todd Haynes’ “black comedy” is a score that’s akin to someone slamming a gong whenever the film wants us to realize a character on-screen has had a revelation. Pair those overbearing musical cues with lurid melodrama and camp and I get why the “comedy” aspect is pointed at by many who watch, but it’s definitely not where my head went. They aren’t wrong. May December just wasn’t quite for me because I wish Haynes went even further.

That’s okay, though, since its real success is the acting. I don’t just mean Julianne Moore as Gracie, Natalie Portman as Elizabeth, and Charles Melton stealing the show as Joe, but the performances of those characters too. Because we don’t truly see who they are even if the point is finding them (Elizabeth enters Gracie and Joe’s home to get a better feeling for who they are before starring in an indie film about their infamous romance). They’re all hiding to save face, exploit, and survive. They do it so well that they ultimately end up hiding from themselves.

How guarded must Gracie and Joe be? They cannot stop Elizabeth’s film (and it’s not like they lack experience dealing with tabloid fodder and sordid accounts cashing in on the fact she was thirty-six and married when commencing her affair with him at just thirteen), so they can only hope to steer perception. Add context. Kill with kindness. Even if Gracie loathes the scrutiny and Joe’s embarrassed by the moment (he is now only the same age she was when they got together and yet his youngest children are currently graduating high school).

How genuine is Elizabeth? She seems honest—a sponge seeking inspiration. As time passes, however, the veil drops. Her intentions with the “story” come out (less to set records straight and more to earn an Oscar regardless of any collateral damage that “story” has on the lives it’s based upon) and you begin to wonder if there are any lines she won’t cross to achieve her goals while also judging the woman she’s aping for crossing her own. That doesn’t mean you should compare their crimes. Only that neither Elizabeth nor Gracie is perfect.

And then there’s the real victims left to pick up the pieces of lives they didn’t ask to have. Joe’s three children. The children Gracie had with her first husband who now have children of their own the same age as the former (Elizabeth Yu’s Mary and Gabriel Chung’s Charlie). And what about Joe? He can say he’s in love (and he might be despite mounting frustrations leading to a pitch-perfect, exasperated f-bomb upon entering the house to hear Gracie’s sobs) and that he wanted all this, but he was still a child. Becoming a father doesn’t negate that. If anything, it only prolongs his inability to unpack what it truly means.

The result is a complex character study that demands we not lose sight of the layers involved. You don’t have to vilify or champion anyone to do so either. The circumstances call for it, but screenwriter Samy Burch (who shares story credit with Alex Mechanik) empathetically supplies them a humanity that asks us to stop short and consider where happiness meets contentment and acceptance meets defeat. Because while Georgie (a great Cory Michael Smith) has embraced the cartoonish chaos, Joe is still in suspended animation. He is waking up, though. And Melton’s growing desperation proves absolutely heart-breaking.