“May December” & How the Public Eye Perpetuates Predation

Todd Haynes’s latest film is pure melodrama and mayhem

WARNING: This review contains spoilers.

There has always been something disturbing about pristine suburbia, and director Todd Haynes knows this better than anyone. His most celebrated films innately acknowledge the oppressiveness of this environment and the impossible task of conformity paired with the desire not to be required to. But while the exhausting standards of suburbia are confining in films like Safe and Carol, May December depicts an anguished desire to assimilate into these absurd and demoralizing standards and the draining desperation to maintain the illusion of their propriety. 

In May December, the despairing attempt at normalcy comes from Gracie (Julianne Moore), who had dominated the covers of tabloids twenty years prior as a result of her relationship with her son’s thirteen-year-old classmate Joe (Charles Melton). When we meet them, they are married with three kids and are host to an actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), who arrives to research the couple for her role as Gracie in an upcoming film.

Elizabeth’s arrival is not met with a warm welcome, as family and neighbors alike see her presence as a threat of the destruction of the delicate world that Gracie and Joe have worked so hard to construct. They have manipulated their entire environment into a semblance of normalcy in which even the neighbors are complicit, indulging in Gracie’s business with a quiet shame because it is a means of keeping her busy.

As much as they try to ignore them, reminders of the immorality at the root of Joe and Gracie’s relationship are ever-present. At first, these reminders seem exclusively external — hate mail or offhand comments from outsiders; simply inconveniences that they try to brush off. But the more time that Elizabeth spends in the family’s vicinity, the more off-kilter their marital environment becomes. As in Carol, gazes and small movements are a means of revealing a truth that subverts an illusion, but instead of unveiling a tender romance, these seemingly inconsequential acts reveal the horrific and lurid reality that has always been the core of Joe and Gracie’s relationship. 

Elizabeth promises her intrusive observation and intense inquisition is in service of a long-overdue honest portrayal of their marriage; Joe and Gracie’s heightened performance of normalcy exists in the wake of twenty years of sensationalized tabloid scrutiny from the public’s fetishized infatuation with true crime. As a means of accessing this honesty, Elizabeth’s embodiment of Gracie seeks to both distill the reality of her emotions and imitate her false image of sanctity. To balance this dialectic, and to authentically perform an appearance already so inauthentic, Elizabeth begins to replicate Gracie’s manipulation. Her intent of authenticity becomes so blinding that her method resusiticates the trauma she is trying to understand. The spotlight shifts from Gracie to Elizabeth, and her pantomime of predation becomes the thing itself. 

At the heart of this all is Joe, the only character who is not reduced to a delusive seriocomical melodrama. His stylistic separation from the rest of the characters illuminates his lack of awareness and control of the artifice. He has been lied to his whole life, told repeatedly throughout the film that his exploitation by both Elizabeth and Gracie is of his own doing. He has been assigned responsibility for his own trauma and burdened with the agency of adulthood despite having been stripped of childhood. Joe is forever an abused thirteen-year-old trapped in the body of a grown man, sobbing the arms of his own children who enjoyed the adolescence he was robbed of and possess a maturity he cannot access. 

The tragedy of Joe is haunting and horrifying, and comes into sharp focus when contrasted with two women primarily concerned with the stilts of their respective artificiality. Each character embodies a sense of sincerity in their refusal (or in Joe’s case, trauma-induced inability) to be self-reflective, but May December itself is overtly reflective and rarely self-serious. The film’s self-referential artifice provides a brutal context and a comedic dimension, employing the classic melodramatic balance of irony and sincerity. This balance gives the audience an intense emotional connection and a significant distance from the content, allowing them to be immersed while providing the distance to allow a perspective on the content’s relationship to their own world. 

Through striking this balance, May December becomes a painful condemnation of obsessive indulgence and cheap voyeurism disguised as seriousness. Exploitation is further exploited by a leering public who feign serious concern while feeding morbid curiosity, revealed when Elizabeth’s supposed honest portrait of Gracie is in fact another sensationalized Lifetime movie. May December cannot be reduced to a single thematic thesis, but it does expertly unmask the collective complicity required to perpetuate the structure of American fame.

OVERALL SCORE: 9/10

May December was released on December 1, 2023 and is currently streaming on Netflix.