May December (2023)

I thought the Mary Kay Letourneau story provided a better frame for May December than Persona or any other cinematic references director Todd Haynes and writers Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik may have planted along the way. Julianne Moore has the Letourneau role, playing Gracie Atherton-Yoo, who was caught having sex with 13-year-old Korean-American Joe Yoo when she was 36 (by comparison, Letourneau’s 12-year-old paramour Vili Fualaau was Samoan). It’s 20 years later, prison sentence completed, back at home in Savannah, Georgia, together, Gracie and Joe now married with children. A TV movie is being made about the case. Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) has been cast to play Gracie. She is visiting the family and their home to research her role. The dynamics between Gracie and Elizabeth (and one or two or three carefully composed shots) are where the Persona parallels originate. Portman and Moore are great, as they usually are, but I thought Charles Melton as Joe virtually stole the show, underscoring the kind of silent damage that goes on with sexual abuse. Joe is 36 in this picture, the same age as Gracie when she seduced him (in May December she is not a teacher but a coworker with Joe at a pet store). Their children are nearly grown—a pair of twins are graduating high school as part of the story here. Facing an empty nest at an age when many are starting a family, Joe is sad to see, a lost soul. His son thinks he is a joke. He is on the prowl for an affair but has no idea how to go about it. Deep resentments toward Gracie seem to be surfacing more and more undeniably. She still controls and manipulates him, treating him like a child. Moore plays Gracie as at once an innocent, a loving mama bear defending her family, and a monster, which is the picture’s subtle drift even as she goes on like the head of a happy brood. Portman is unsurprisingly very good as an awkward, intrusive, and in many ways unwelcome presence, asking inappropriate questions. When she’s called on it—she’s not often called on it—she grows defensive about the work and craft of the actor. She glides through many encounters on her star power. In a scene where she visits a high school theater class, one boy who is obviously a class clown asks her about shooting sex scenes. She takes the question seriously, answers in detail, and keeps calling him by name. It feels notably icky—like she might have some ideas about seducing him, inspired (she would no doubt say) by her studies of Gracie. I thought the picture at large was a bit muddled, though anchored by the stellar performances of the principals. There are times, likely because I’m male of a certain age, where Vili Fualaau strikes me not as victim, but as lucky, why if my 7th-grade biology teacher (who once told us to go home and tell our parents we had learned about “mastication” in science class) had ever approached me... Et cetera. You know how we can think. But May December in that regard is more realistic, showing the sad wreck that comes with all sexual abuse.