David Farnor | On 23, Dec 2023

Director: Todd Haynes
Cast: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton
Certificate: 15

“This isn’t a story. This is my life.” “There’s no need to get so worked up about it.” That’s the sound of an actor and real life colliding in Todd Haynes’ May December. The film follows Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a Hollywood star who’s preparing to play a notorious former schoolteacher. That would be Gracie (Julianne Moore), who had an affair while married with a 17-year-old pupil, Joe. Now, after some time in prison, Gracie is living in the community and selling cakes to her neighbours – and she’s married to Joe (Charles Melton), who’s 23 years younger than her.

Elizabeth is invited into their home and wastes no time in trying to peel back the layers of her subject and find out what makes her tick. Gracie, it seems, is politely happy to provide her with answers to questions and give her an insight into her life. But, of course, nothing is as it appears, and the picture-perfect surface of Gracie and Joe’s domestic bliss begins to crack.

It’s meaty material to chew on and the script by Samy Burch wonderfully relishes the juicy scandal, lurching from melodrama to dark comedy to self-aware reflection on the relationship between acting and authenticity. The cast are all in on the game, with Julianne Moore superbly navigating the line between highly strung normality and a fragile person putting on a show of highly strung normality. She both wants the attention and abhors it, fearful of scrutiny. Needless to say, she’s not a sympathetic figure.

Charles Melton is marvellous as Joe, digging into the strange complexities of a man who has arrived at middle age without getting the chance to grow up normally. He’s at once confident and bashfully naive, watching his son come of age and do things that were never on the cards for him. “I can’t tell if we’re connecting or if I’m just creating a bad memory for you,” he tells him candidly, with the heartbreaking knowledge that both are true.

Haynes draws out these nuances from his cast with a gentle touch that swings from intimate curiosity to voyeuristic exploitation. He choreographs his central trio with precision, finding mirror images and symmetry that’s ever so slightly off as their lives overlaps to increasing degrees. All the while, the music (a re-orchestration of Michel Legrand’s score for The Go-Between by Marcelo Zarvos) is a loud, unnerving intrusion, a swirl of interlocking melodies and ominous portent that threatens to send a piano off-kilter down the stairs – just the kind of thing you’d expect to happen in the trashy climax of a daytime soap opera.

At the heart of it all is Natalie Portman, who is fiendishly good as Elizabeth. Is she an artist who loves to get under the skin of characters or just another person peeking at a sordid crime after the fact and exploiting it for their own benefit? The more time we spend with her, the more she becomes the latter, as Portman gradually ups Elizabeth’s impression of Gracie by minute degrees, inserting herself into their marriage with a calculating, unscrupulous manner while excavating the wreckage of lives ruined around them. “This is just what grown-ups do,” she says to Joe at one point, even though she becomes lost in the haze of it all too. She’s not sympathetic either.

The result is an often daring exploration of difficult subject matter that also serves as a study of society and the media’s fascination with such cases. At one point, Portman talks to a drama class about playing romantic scenes. “You start to lose the line of am I pretending to be experiencing pleasure or am I pretending that I’m not?” Haynes puts us right in between those two sensations and lets us squirm.

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