A Review of May December that Mainly Centers on My Being in the Same Room as Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore
When you’ve reached this level of fame and notoriety in the field of film criticism, things just come to you. Do I get stopped on the street? Yes. Free drugs? Of course. The table you’ve been dying to get at that hot new restaurant? I haven’t been there in months, it’s really gone downhill.
So was I surprised when I got invited to a special sneak preview of May December, the new Todd Haynes film starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore a full two hours before its worldwide release on Netflix? Not in the slightest. And when I found out Natalie and Julianne would be at the screening? Well, I’d been avoiding them around town for a few weeks now, but I figured what the hell.
When I got to the theater I flashed my New York Public Library card press badge and was escorted to the front of the auditorium and seated far to the right of the screen, directly behind a woman barreled-over with a nasty case of Spina bifida, which I assured the usher was my preferred seating anyway. I like semi-distorted images and frantically waved sippy cups and my Pilates instructor encourages the craning of my neck for hours on end. Anyway, my seat mate to my immediate right (who if he wasn’t gay it was not for lack of trying) had worked himself into such a tizzy about seeing this movie that he had to use the bathroom a full 3 times before the lights went down, which to facilitate I had to raise my legs and contort my body and offer a “No worries” (there were worries) a full 6 times (there and back) so much so that my Spina bifidic friend looked back at my twisted postures with the utmost pity. But such is the life of a celebrity.
But before we get to the movie, which I realize we’re now 4 paragraphs into this review and no one’s even reading anymore (smash the like button to prove me wrong!), I would like to say that all of these reviews are both parodic exaggerations and 100% true. I feel that’s a necessary injection of complicated sincerity before wading into a discussion of this movie, which contains multitudes of artifice and truth and artificial truths and truths about artifice and tiers and tears and is one of the best films of the year, if not the best.
Julianne Moore plays Gracie, who back in the 90s had a Mary Kay Letourneau-esque affair with Joe, played by Charles Melton, which has blossomed into a marriage as dysfunctional as one might assume such an affair would blossom into. The former tabloid sensation is now going to be played in a movie by Natalie Portman’s character Elizabeth, and Elizabeth has decided to make the trek to the couple’s home in Savannah to shadow Gracie in an effort to do justice to the performance.
Even writing that synopsis feels like a limp-dicked attempt to capture the complexity of this film, but at least you can imagine the dimensions and meta-dimensions and meta-meta-dimensions of an actress playing an actress playing a Z-list celebrity played by an actress who is working through the emotions of a woman both seducing and acting like she’s been seduced by a boy who’s now both a man and acting like he’s a man and the whole thing gives me such vertigo I might throw up.
Amazingly, Todd Haynes never gets lost in his direction. When the film could easily tip into either unintended schmaltz or sterile irony, Haynes walks the tightrope the whole time by embracing the very things that could be pitfalls. Marcelo Zarvos’s score for the film is an adaptation of Michel Legrand’s music for the film The Go-Between (how’s that for meta?), and is both startlingly melodramatic and deeply affecting. Additionally, two done-to-death visual motifs (butterflies (“hey that means metamorphosis!“ 🥴) and mirrors (“hey that means duality!” 🥴)) are here revived both for their meaning and their done-to-deathness. One mirror-centric scene has Julianne Moore applying makeup to Natalie Portman, and the preening and titivations are so charged with eroticism that I passed out and only came to while writing this review. In all of these respects our shared knowledge of cinematic practices acts as a sort of shorthand that Haynes mines to both ironically remind us that this whole thing is just artifice, and that that patina of artifice is itself of the people, by the people, and for the people to protect the people from the terrible truths of the human condition which, spoiler alert, afflicts the people. It is our shield for exposed hearts. We wink that we may not cry.
Granted, Haynes has been here before. One of the forefathers of the New Queer Cinema movement, Haynes has a reputation for plundering the depths of humanity through lenses as self-conscious as an ugly high schooler, and he’s always had a kinky interest in celebrity. Take his great short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which is basically an E! True Hollywood Story acted out by literal Barbie dolls. Or how about Far From Heaven, which again stars Julianne Moore as a woman living the perfect 1950s Douglas Sirkian life before being blindsided by her husband’s homosexuality. Haynes is also not the first to explore the ways in which women’s constructed personalities begin to surreally overlap to the point where we’re left wondering who’s who. (Think Persona…3 Women…Two Girls, One Cup…)
I can say with utmost certainty, however, that this is Haynes’ crowning achievement. The three lead performances (Portman playing with her own celebrity, Moore lisping her way through feigned innocence, Melton unsure if he should be processing trauma or if he just totally fucked a MILF) are all note-perfect, and the whole thing really just feels like a culmination of Haynes career-long obsessions. When the lights came up and the stars took the stage for a polite Q&A (a ritual which itself was skewered by the movie’s keen eye), I felt like we all shrank back in our seats, still avoiding the film’s uncomfortable implications. And my question (“Kiss? Topless?”) was unceremoniously passed up anyway. International celebrity and 15 bucks will get you a cup of coffee in this town.