May December

Taking part in the great Australian tradition of attending a Boxing Day screening, a sell-out crowd packed into the most recent new release at the Perth Festival’s Somerville Cinema.

The words “May December” hint at a certain kind of romance, however, this latest project from director, Todd Haynes (Carol, I’m Not There, Far From Heaven) is nothing of the kind.

Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a TV actress with ambitions beyond the small screen is researching her next role by spending time with the real-life woman she will be playing.

Gracie Atherton (Julianne Moore) willingly accepts Elizabeth into her family and allows her to ask very intimate questions to help Elizabeth get under Gracie’s skin.

The challenge for Elizabeth is that Gracie’s subdued demeanour hides a 20-year-old scandal that had her jailed and forever branded a “sex offender” for seducing a 13-year-old boy, Joe (Charles Melton), now her husband and father of her three children.

Joe also seems happy for Elizabeth to infiltrate his family life, even at a crucial time when his youngest twins are graduating High School.  He is now 36, the same age Gracie was when their illicit relationship began.

Are Gracie and Joe still happy? Will their marriage survive when the twins are off at college with their older sister?  Will their small-town home ever forgive and forget their once-illegal relationship, especially once Elizabeth’s film is made?

May December (written by Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik) asks many questions of its audience and sometimes leaves us to figure out the answers.

There are uncomfortable scenes, such as one when Gracie’s ex-husband and grown children arrive at the same restaurant Joe has booked them into for the twins’ graduation dinner.

Pleasantries are exchanged, but there is nothing pleasant about this encounter.

Gracie’s son, Georgie (Cory Michael Smith) shows that he has his mother’s drama-queen qualities when he walks off the stage from his pub cover-band complaining about the drummer being off the beat, only to find his father in the audience, being interviewed by Elizabeth.

Should we believe him when he tells her that Gracie has secrets she never talks about that involve her four brothers?  Is he a reliable source of information or just seeking attention (like his mother)?

Sometimes, there are clues as to how we should be feeling in the musical score by Marcelo Zarvos (inspired and adapted from Michel Legrand’s score for the 1970’s film The Go-Between – once again, why?  Another question for us to seek an answer to).

Banal moments are sometimes highlighted by melodramatic music, more befitting a horror film than a kitchen sink drama, making some scenes humorous rather than severe.

This mirrors Gracie’s undercurrent of emotions where she cries uncontrollably over a cancelled baking order (she runs a cake business from home) and Joe consoles her, as if it’s a life-or-death situation.

Elizabeth is embarrassed that anyone recognises her from her run-of-the-mill, veterinary TV series, “Nora’s Ark”, provoking a few chuckles from the audience.

Any wonder she longs for deeper roles with more gravitas.

Everything is in a film frame for a reason - everything has been carefully planned and selected, so I was intrigued by a portrait of a woman with flowers for hair, reflected in the ladies’ room mirror when Elizabeth and Gracie during a dinner scene.

A dream interpretation of this image suggests the person is growing and their attitudes are changing.  A more literal meaning of women wearing flowers in their hair involves the pursuit of love and desire for conjugal happiness – this rings true, especially for Gracie.

Performances are solid from everyone – Julianne Moore’s baby-girl voice for Gracie begins to be creepily mimicked perfectly by Elizabeth.

Joe’s strange boyishness is fascinatingly played by Charles Melton.  His hobby of collecting butterflies once again provides beautiful images of chrysalises exploding with life, as opposed to Joe’s domestic rut.

Everything is there for a reason – Elizabeth uses a nebulizer before sleeping and sometimes puffs on an inhaler, symbolic of her need for information, sucking up the life and oxygen from those around her. 

Is she really an asthmatic? Through her extensive research, she would have known that Joe’s sister was asthmatic and that he saved her life once.

Does she really need the nebulizer or is it merely a ploy for getting his attention and control?

Towards the end of the film, an extremely disturbing scene happens, involving a letter Gracie sent to Joe just before she was arrested as a sex offender.  Elizabeth can’t wait to get her hands on it for her “research” and we must choose which woman our affinity goes with.

As Joe proudly observes his children graduating, we surprisingly see Georgie in the audience too.  I didn’t expect him to be so loyal to his mother’s new family.

Joe is overcome with emotion but we will never see his final resolution.

The final scenes seem too personal, but we can’t look away now.

Natalie Portman’s character reads out Gracie’s letter to Joe in character (to another mirror or to a camera) and her impersonation is complete.  She IS Gracie.

However, when we see Elizabeth filming a cheap-looking intimate scene with a young boy, playing the real Joe, she is holding a too-obvious phallic symbol from the pet store where they met.  

This vehicle for Elizabeth’s career hardly seems to be an empathetic tribute to Gracie and Joe’s family life, as the actress demands take after take until she is truly satisfied.

As an audience, we can only guess at what happens next.

May December is screening in the Perth Festival’s outdoor Somerville Cinema until Sunday 31 December.

Jane Keehn

https://www.perthfestival.com.au/events/may-december/