117 min | R | November 17, 2023 | Netflix
Natalie Portman plays an actress who moves in with the woman she is about to portray on screen. Twenty years ago that woman seduced a seventh grader, served her time, and married him. Portman wants the truth, and the truth is the one thing nobody in this house can afford to give.
Elizabeth Berry is a television actress preparing to play Gracie Atherton-Yoo in an independent film. Two decades earlier, Gracie had a sexual relationship with Joe Yoo when he was thirteen. Gracie served prison time, gave birth in custody, and married Joe after her release. Now they live as a respectable suburban family, and Elizabeth moves in to research the role. Todd Haynes builds the film around the act of one woman studying another and the quiet violence that observation does. The real subject is performance, and everyone here is playing a version of themselves for someone else.
Julianne Moore plays Gracie as a woman who has rehearsed her own innocence until she believes it. She speaks in a soft lisp and weaponizes her fragility against anyone who threatens the story she tells. Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth as a predator disguised as an empath. She mirrors Gracie’s gestures and absorbs her mannerisms until the line between research and theft disappears. Charles Melton plays Joe as the only person who never chose his role. He is a grown man arrested at thirteen, and Melton locates that stunted boy in his stooped shoulders and his long silences.
Todd Haynes directs from Samy Burch’s screenplay with control that keeps the film suspended between camp and tragedy. He punctuates ordinary domestic beats with sudden swells of melodramatic piano. A woman opens a refrigerator and the score crashes in as if a body has been discovered. The technique borrows the grammar of daytime soap opera and turns it into a comment on how this family narrates its own life. Haynes frames Elizabeth and Gracie in mirrors again and again, two faces merging in one shot until the original becomes impossible to find.
May December refuses to tell you how to feel, and that refusal is the engine of the whole film. Elizabeth believes she is excavating the truth. She is consuming these people for material. The film implicates the actress, the viewer, and the tabloid machine that turned a crime into entertainment. Joe finally asks whether any of his life was real, and the question arrives too late to undo it. Haynes constructs a hall of mirrors and then makes you watch yourself watching.