‘May December’ - Review
When I was a child, I attracted the interest of men. There was a vivaciousness to me, a preternatural intelligence and maturity, or so they told me, that exempted me from the usual dictates of childhood. They believed that I was their ticket to paradise, a chance at redoing the past, that I was someone whose future could be shaped by their hands. I was proud that I could garner attention from people whose station rose so far above mine, people with careers and cars. When the news finally broke in my circles, I felt shame and constantly crumpled into diminishingly smaller forms of myself. All the while, I harbored a secret desire that one of my knights in shining armor would come and rescue me and let me grow up happy as their slave—sometimes I still fantasize that my life would have been better had it happened like how we’d once planned. In watching May December, I’m reminded that I would not exist as an independent person under the smothering, self-centered love of a pedophile.
While Haynes’ previous films, most notably Velvet Goldmine, tackle the ways in which non-normative sexuality is repressed and subsumed through external institutions, May December finds its scandalous central relationship straddling two worlds, one where the trashy tabloid masses unequivocally condemn any legitimacy in the couple’s age-gap, another where the landed Southern gentry deems their persecuted relationship as being worthy of polite charity and understanding. Between those opposing views, there’s barely enough room for two people to start lives and families together, and so the consequences of scrutiny and the expectation of some personal consistency jam up their internal machinations of growth and happiness.
May December is about dual cases of stunted internal aging. Julianne Moore’s character Gracie, with her childhood lisp retained, keeps busy with her baking business, but when one of the handful of customers qua friends cancels their regular order due to an impending move, she finds herself in hysterics. Charles Melton as Joe finds himself unable to comprehend what fatherhood entails while standing in the midst of it. They find themselves occasionally happy together. But in the black-and-white options provided to them, the couple choose to inhabit the “purely happy” choice in order to not sacrifice themselves, as they both know the tether that binds them is fragile and needs constant tending. The cruelty is that part of that care is in giving themselves the privacy that the ever-judgemental world denies them, which makes it all that much harder to see clearly what breathes between them. Joe, in what may be the closest thing to the climax of the film, finally attempts to broach the controversial inception of his relationship with Gracie, only to find the first questions about their love are too destabilizing for his wife to even begin to entertain. Instead, they find themselves embraced in closeness and comfort once again. Even the most loving partner can make the mistake of trying to help you through full body shakes by holding you violently still. Can you fault the inexperienced-but-well-intentioned for believing that is the only way that they can be needed?
Haynes finds himself dealing with a relationship in which entrenched cultural institutions battle with legal and moral majorities, each vying to simplify the entanglement at its center. The result is pressurized into a perfect diamond, inevitably irresistible to film producers and actresses seeking “complexity and nuance” in their performances.
Turning to Julianne Moore—her history as a darling of indie cinema and her willingness to show her most intimate areas, both private and psychic—serves as an obvious inspiration for Portman’s Elizabeth Berry. The two share an interest in the same kinds of roles: complex women whose surfaces are easy to explain away but who contain unseen depths. Moore’s famous pairings with Haynes, Safe and Far From Heaven, both explore the nuances of a housewife whose environment seeks to pathologize and/or marginalize her desires and insights into herself. She plays women struggling and often failing to create personal meaning (i.e. Boogie Nights), but Gracie Atherton-Yoo is just stuck in homeostasis. The typical Moore-Haynes breakdown never happens despite the constant hints at her extreme emotional dysregulation. Moore often acts out a married life, but in May December her character is a virtuoso at playing house.
Although the Gracie Atherton-Yoo of the film is from a more humble background than that of the high politics pedigree of her real life inspiration (Mary Kay Letournaeu had a brother who was an Executive at Blackwater and a John Birch Congressman father whose career came to an ignominious end after having an affair with a former student), the film’s half-confirmed suggestion of a history of sexual assault at the hands of her brothers matters far less than the incestuous standards it symbolizes. Notice how Gracie treats her children: to her eldest, she gifts a scale on her graduation day; to her younger daughter, she deploys duplicitous comments to plant the idea that she shouldn’t be proud of her body; to her son, she rejects his “scrawny” physique and encourages him to match his father’s build. The reality of whether her trauma and, to a larger extent, her personality disorder are real matters less than this incessant focus on her children’s bodies. We see the same investment now in American Conservatism’s screeds regarding the sanctity of non-transitioning children’s right to not be “subjected” to trans peers, justifying state-wide legislative genocide. There’s a religiosity around set gender roles, seeing men in children, and preserving some arrested development of your past self within your current reality.
It may be good advice to get in touch with your inner child, but Gracie Atherton-Yoo takes it to an unhealthy extreme. For her, it’s less about pedophilia as a sexuality than as a consequence of pain. There’s a smaller self inside her that she’s never grown beyond that’s screaming at her to feed it, and what it wants is sick. This spillover onto her children is justified by a climate that encourages us to imprint our desires upon children, whether it be projecting the ideal of a future personhood or rallying against drag queen story hour.
May December positions this metatextuality as a Hollywood commentary through its use of child stars. Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), famous for his role in Riverdale; Honor Atherton-Yoo (Piper Curda), a Disney Channel regular; and actress Elizabeth Berry (Portman), who was publicly sexualized in her debut role in Leon: The Professional and the original choice for the titular role in Adrian Lyne’s adaptation of Lolita. The cast are no strangers to the scrutiny of the spotlight at a young age, and there’s a quality to the deliberateness of their presentation (Portman’s over-fawning responses to overtures from her fans or Melton’s silent-bedrock-hunk-of-man) that comes only through the repetition of performance dictated by a life spent in front of the camera from an early age.
As the power dynamic between Gracie and Joe awaited "adulthood” for the absolution of its pedophilic inception, so too do the hordes of creeping men bray at “jailbait”, eagerly anticipating the future nude scenes of today’s child stars. This is the plight that all famous children face. Think of your childhood in the tabloid headlines, the self-notoriety that would imbue in you; how you’d first come to know yourself through the media panopticon that surrounded you, your every choice of personhood made from then on as either a confirmation or rejection of the so-called facts, never with the path-forging confidence of those blessed with a lack of fame. Today, you’d see deepfakes of your own flesh and bones repurposed into ragdoll playthings generated for feeding the fantasies of unknowable men. Current child protectionism hardlines legal ages of consent to a degree that often obscures how porous the boundary of exploitation can be, especially when considering that social age can widely differ from someone’s biological age. This is true of Joe, who at 36 appears to have the self-confidence of a hot ticket 16-year old, bolstered primarily by the sexual affection he receives, covering over an absolute lack of personal possession.
The roles of instructor and protégé are explored through Elizabeth Berry, modeling her acting off of Gracie in a way that overtly references Persona. Berry is the film’s most enigmatic character; while Melton and Moore make gestures towards didacticism, Portman remains tacitly, quietly observant. The reactions she elicits are almost entirely through the wake she leaves after having exited a room. Mainly, it’s the thoughts she brings out in the central couple. While Gracie is loud and demanding with her children, she is reserved and silently resentful when it comes to Elizabeth. She is unable to establish a position of power over Elizabeth in the same way she exploited a young boy through their manager-employee relationship. Unable to confront another actual adult, she lets her presence run her life. By the time she is “on her last nerves”, Gracie has still yet to express any discontent with the woman that she sees as being a tyrannous force in her life. Portman’s character primarily exists to surface the dormant conflicts between Charlie and Grace and—in a rare move in a world of increasingly self-demeaning filmmaking—suggests that the process of cinema has a cathartic potential for all involved and that it really does, if not capture, at least facilitate the truth.
What, then, do we learn from Portman’s presence? That Gracie’s weakness is rooted in an inability to assert herself in an adult world, a true-to-life realization of her initially dismissable claim of being “naive”. That avoidance and anxiety keeps Gracie from disrupting the delicate balance of her life, tolerating what’s beyond her control out of fear that calling attention to the matter will inflate it to unmanageable proportions. In all likelihood, the tabloids scared her out of making herself big ever again. This is the same reason she can’t engage in an honest conversation with her husband: if they really loved each other so much, wouldn’t he know about and also attempt to fix this aspect of her?
For Joe, he has always wanted to be the exception in someone’s life. Whether it be with his wife or his children, he is singularly invested in making himself into whatever he anticipates they want from him. Always the cool guy, never himself. The tragedy is that in his own state of stunted adolescence, he has been deprived of the wisdom of adulthood that’s required to truly support a partner. He accommodates Gracie’s shortcomings but can’t offer her the aid to transcend them. He, too, is petrified in the face of the unstoppable force that has entered his life, silenced by the knowledge that this was, once it came to a certain point, his own choice for his life. He felt the thrill of being young and in love, of being blessed by the adulation of a workplace superior, rising above his own subject-position, and laying claim to what most adults held as forbidden to him.
May December is a personal tragedy wrapped in a domestic drama mapped onto the politics of childhood. It’s a story of deep captivity, powerless rapture in the face of love, and how the harm experienced during childhood can echo out into adulthood. It captures the reality of what it’s like to live with regret about your exploitation and the awful temptation to let it get worse. We never stop rearing as a means of escaping from a rudderless life: our children, ourselves, our spouses, endangered monarch butterflies. Unbeknownst to Joe as he raises his delicate beauties with the intention of love and care, when monarchs are brought up in captivity, they are unlikely to live long in the wild.