Pet Shop Boy

Post-dramatic, post-melodramatic, post-comic, post-camp, May December is a dazzling through-the-looking-glass study of personal identity that wields genre thrills with surgical precision. “Insecure people are very dangerous, don’t you think?” says TV actress Elizabeth Berry to basket case cradle-robber Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore). “I’m secure,” replies Gracie. “Make sure you put that in there.”

Elizabeth is playing Gracie in an upcoming biopic, and is spending a few weeks in steamy Savannah, Georgia, to observe her and the generationally asymmetric relationship she has with Joe Yoo (Charles Melton). The couple’s marriage started with a torrid affair two decades earlier, in the stockroom of a local pet shop just after a then-13-year-old Joe finished seventh grade. Gracie, 36, was married but eager to love him; the statutory rape led to her imprisonment and a baby born behind bars. PET SHOP ROMANCE, the tabloids squealed. LABOR OF LOVE, they declared when she became an inmate mother.

MAY DECEMBER ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Directed by: Todd Haynes
Written by: Samy Burch
Starring:Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, D.W. Moffett, Piper Curda, Elizabeth Yu
Running time: 113 min

Now, 23 years later, Gracie and Joe have seemingly settled, the parents of twins about to graduate from high school and an older daughter already in college. Everything looks placid, but only because Gracie wields such an iron fist under her velvet glove—counting Joe’s beers, berating him in bed for smelling too smokey from the afternoon cookout, nagging her son about calcium deficiencies and jibing her daughter over not being perfectly svelte. “You’re so brave for showing your arms,” she says in a passive aggressive purr. Meanwhile, her cake business only stays afloat because of repeat orders from a few sympathetic friends. It’s all about shellacking over the unexamined life with studied appearances and pink lipstick, suppressing any defects like that pecky lisp of hers that slips out when she’s stressed.

And yet the town’s lingering resentment over their illicit love still haunts them—and even prompts an occasional box of shit to appear in the mail. There was already a ripped-from-the-headlines TV movie years ago, and now Elizabeth is stirring the pot with her new film. “It’s a very complex and human story,” she says with opportunistic sincerity. But she’s just as desperately in denial about her own motivations. She stars on a popular TV show called Norah’s Ark, but she resents it and wants a meatier project. Gracie, to her, is that role. “I feel like I’m getting to something true,” she says while clearly relishing the tawdry details. She even looks at screen tests from the young men auditioning to play Joe. “Not sexy enough,” is her response.

The more Elizabeth finds out about them, the more cracks show in Gracie and Joe’s coupledom and the more she bears witness to the collateral damage. The scandal especially damaged Gracie’s son Georgie, from her first marriage. “It ruined my life,” he confesses. And then he shares an even darker secret about his mother. Is it true? So much in the film hinges on suppressing the truth that it’s hard to ignore.

Joe especially is stunted, a sweet presence but clearly adrift. His hobby is raising monarch butterflies to help repopulate their numbers, helping them to survive their youth and reach maturity—a poignant metaphor for his own trauma, and yet another character’s coping mechanism in a movie full of them. The damage is everywhere, especially when it comes to sex. “What was this about?” one character says after a spontaneous quickie. “This is just what grown-ups do,” says the other, trying to seem wiser but really just revealing her own wobbly moral compass. What are the lines you cannot cross? At what point do you take responsibility for the psychic damage you might have caused?

Todd Haynes’ triumph here as a filmmaker is his masterful tonal shifts, both using melodramatic tropes and subverting them in a sort of reclamation of their power to reveal deep wells of emotional insight. His queer cinema roots inform that sensibility, goosing the story with clichéd moments and a few campy zings that are both laughably silly and yet, in their own way, undeniably devastating.

But it’s Samy Burch’s sly, sensitive script that makes it all possible and creates the scenario where such a rich gumbo of human emotion can bubble up from within. Funny, dark, strange, and seriously subversive, May December is ultimately a tragic rumination on how people see themselves, how they present to the world and the personal narratives they create in order to justify who they say they are and what they’ve done to those around them.