The critical darling May December reminded me of another 2023 Netflix prestige awards contender, David Fincher’s The Killer. That genre movie was about trying to tell a realistic version of the cool super spy assassin and I found that enterprise to be fitfully interesting but mostly dull and unfulfilled. This movie seems to be going for a similar artistic approach under director Todd Haynes (Carol, Far From Heaven), tackling a sensationalized ripped-from-the-tabloids tale of perversity but telling a more realistic version, which also leaves the movie fitfully interesting but mostly dull and unfulfilled. May December is a frustrating viewing experience because you easily recognize so much good, so many exciting or intriguing elements, but I came away wishing I had seen a different combination and execution.

Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) is a famous actress with an exciting new movie role. She’s going to play Gracie (Julianne Moore), a woman who gained national scandal for her sexual relationship with a then-13-year-old Joe. The two of them have been together for several decades and have several children and now are inviting Elizabeth into their home to better understand her character. Each person is on their guard. Elizabeth wants to keep prying to uncover emotional truths that she can gobble up to improve her future performance and career. Gracie is wary of making sure the version of her story that she wants for public media consumption is what Elizabeth receives. And Joe (Charles Melton), now in his mid-thirties and looking more like an older brother than father to his graduating children, is reflecting about the history of his relationship and who was culpable.

There’s so much here in the premise of an actress studying her subject and wreaking domestic havoc in her attempt to discover secret truths that would rather stay hidden. May December uses this premise as an investigative device, allowing the inquisitive actress to serve as the role of the audience, trying to form a cohesive vision of events from each new interview. It allows the first half of the movie to feel like a true-crime mystery, uncovering the different sides of a sordid story and the lasting consequences and legacy for so many. There’s a very lurid Single White Female approach you could go, where the avatar of the person starts to replace the real person, where Elizabeth crosses all sorts of lines and even thinks about crossing some of the same lines that Gracie had; what better way to get in the mind of a predator, right? I was waiting for this interloper to destabilize this carefully put-together illusion of a “normal family,” but by the end you feel like little has been learned and most everything reverts to its prior stasis. I suppose that’s, again, the more realistic version of this kind of story, that even when confronted with uncomfortable revelations most people will fall back on what they know. May December’s underwhelming conclusion is that, by the end, maybe people are actually who we think they are.

Haynes’ cinematic specialty is exploring the artificiality of movies, from having multiple actors portray Bob Dylan in 2007’s I’m Not There, to destabilizing the nostalgia of the 1950s Douglas Sirk-styled romantic drama with 2002’s Far From Heaven. He’s also inherently drawn to stories of emotional and sexual repression. This movie is all about performance as identity; it’s about an actress trying to refine her tools, but it’s also about a middle-aged woman who has adopted performance as her defense system (this also might explain why Gracie’s lisp seems to come and go). Some part of her has to know that she crossed some very serious lines, no matter how many times she explains away their relationship as merely “unconventional.” Even though they’ve kept this union for 25 or so years, it still began when Joe was 13 years old and she was an adult. There are very intriguing dimensions to this dramatic dynamic, with the excuse of a Hollywood version of their “love story” to motivate each participant to reflect with renewed perspective. The problem is that Gracie has worn her mask for so long that I doubt there is another version of her any longer (“I am naive. In a way, it’s a gift”). As a means of survival, she projects herself as a well-intentioned victim of scrutiny rather than as a child predator who has manipulated her husband into codependency for decades. This means that, frustratingly, there isn’t much there to glean once the facts of the case have been collected, which makes watching a bad TV actress try and better emulate a bad person incapable of introspection seem like an empty exercise in artistic masturbation, and maybe that’s the point?

The conversation around May December being some kind of “camp comedy” (it was recently nominated for Best Comedy/Musical by the Golden Globes) has left me genuinely stupefied. I think the term “camp” is used a little too loosely, as some seem to conflate any heightened emotion as equivalent to camp. May December is really more an example of melodrama. It’s near impossible to retell the Mary Kay Letourneau story without the use of melodrama, so its inclusion doesn’t merely qualify the movie as camp. But at the same time Haynes is making deliberate use of certain elements that make the movie even more jarring, like the oppressive and operatic musical stings that hearken to earlier 1950s melodramas. These musical intrusions are so broadly portentous that it’s practically like Haynes is elbowing you and saying, “Eh, eh?” I suppose you can laugh at how arch and over-the-top the musical stings are, but is this a comedic intention? Are we supposed to laugh at how out of place this musical arrangement is in modern filmmaking, or is Haynes trying to draw allusions to old Hollywood melodramas and make a case for this being similar? Whatever the case may be, I guess one could laugh at the stilted performances but then I think that’s approaching the movie from an ironic distance that makes it harder to emotionally engage, which seems like the whole point of the exercise, to go deeper than lazy tabloid summation.

The performances from the female leads circling and studying one another are rather heavy on mannered affectations and arch irony, but it’s Melton (TV’s Riverdale) who emerges as the soul of the movie. He’s so easy going and dutiful, quick to defend his wife and assure everyone that even at 13 years old he knew what he was doing and consented to their affair. Of course this is nonsense, and the real draw of the movie is watching this family man begin to crack, and when he does it’s like every repressed emotion comes spilling out. It makes you wish that he had been the main character of the story and Elizabeth more the supporting character trailing after.

Allow me a tangent, dear reader, because I’m reminded of the 2023 re-release of 1979’s notorious Caligula where a producer tried to re-edit the famously trashy movie, hewing closer to author Gore Vidal’s original screenplay and less the explicit excess of producer and Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione’s editorial influence. It seems like so much effort to reclaim one of cinema’s most over-the-top movies, but can you really make a classy version of a movie about the cruel Roman emperor that has a wall of spinning blades as an execution device and copious floating brothels? The movie is forever known for its trashy and outrageous elements because it is emulating an outrageous tyrant of history given to hedonistic and lascivious excess. Nobody wants the “classy” version of this sensational story because that’s the tamped-down and boring version of this story (granted, there are plenty of prurient Guccione additions that we could also do without). Taking sensational melodrama and trying to subvert the sensationalism under the guise of genre deconstruction can work; however, the key is that the “classy” approach has to be a more compelling alternative to the soapier, melodramatic version. I think I would have enjoyed the more sundry and soapy version of May December because with this version I felt too removed, and the movie itself felt too removed and uninterested in so many of its more potent elements for the sake of drifting ambiguity. It’s a drama that seems to stew in downy contemplation but without enough compelling examination to make the effort fulfilling. I kept waiting for the movie to open up, and then the movie just ran out of time. It’s got some admirable goals, and a strong performance from Melton that makes your heart ache, but May December would have been better served either being far more trashy or far more serious rather than straddling a middle ground that left me distant and impatient and ultimately disappointed.

Nate’s Grade: C+