My Weekend with "May December"

On Comedy (Not), Predators and Prey (multiple), and Todd Haynes (always brilliant)

“May December” and “Far From Heaven”

My husband isn’t a heavy-handed moralist, but he does have a tendency to go a little too “high” when I’m down on the ground with other earthly creatures of desire, pain, grief, and hunger. (He’s a reserved Presbyterian, descended from well-bred lawyers in Ithaca, New York, and I’m both a redhead and a Newark, New Jersey child of Russian/Polish Jewish immigrants, so you know….) We agree on the important things, like Trump and feminism and grammar. As for our disagreements, we usually spar amiably about them; we’re habitual interpreters, so rarely feel the need to wrestle the other to the ground. But sometimes a prouncement of his hits too close to home, and suddenly I’m screaming and crying and assaulting him with grievances that are decades old. (We’ve been together 50 years, so my hurts can be pretty stale.)

It happened two days ago. I was preparing to write this piece and, as usual, was re-watching the movies I wanted to talk about until they were living in me and I was living in them. In this case, that meant re-watching “Far From Heaven” and “Carol” as well as “May December” multiple times. I had lots of ideas about what I wanted to write, and Edward was receptive and encouraging, until we started talking about Gracie (Julianne Moore) in “May December.”

Gracie is a tightly controlled woman who—although she denies it to herself and others—is haunted by the damage she did and the insecurities she is now confronting decades after she was flayed by the headlines and ultimately served a prison sentence for her affair with a seventh-grade boy, Joe (Charles Melton.) After release from prison, she marries Joe and raises a family with him in Savannah, Georgia. The story opens with two disruptive happenings: The twins she’s raised with Joe are about to graduate from high school and leave the “nest,” forcing both Gracie and Joe to imagine life together alone. And a soap-opera actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) arrives to do research for a film she’s cast in as Gracie.

Elizabeth’s goal—stated numerous unctious times—is to get at something “true” (behind the tabloid headlines, it’s implied.) But her sleuthing and poking is threatening to Elizabeth, who desperately wants to preserve the narrative she tells herself (that Joe seduced her, that they have a rare and special love that transcends their age difference, and that everything is lovely in her world.) Her self-deception is so profound that soon after Elizabeth arrives, Grace shows her a card Joe made her when he was 13 that is apparently meant to prove how much he loved her but that is embarassingly juvenile—irridescent, glittery letters, childish prose—both to Elizabeth and to us. This was just a kid!—and you’re offering his little project as proof of….what? Perhaps, as she says to Joe later as he struggles (an extraordinary performance by Charles Melton) to talk to her about his awakening sense of having being too young when they began, as proof that he was “in charge” in the relationship, that he was the one who made it happen.

I’ve heard from friends that audience laugh uproariously when Gracie brings out that card. And I’m baffled as to how anyone could find it comical. Or how Gracie’s body-shaming of her daughter (shopping for a graduation dress, she “congratulates” her daughter for having the bravery to show her arms) could be seen as “wickedly funny.” Yet apparently the screenwriter Samy Burch did mean for the film to be “darkly comic” and numerous reviewers have agreed.

It’s left me feeling like an alien. Not for the first time. I thought “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once,” was a pretentious jumble of audience pandering, banal philosophising about “life,” and narrative chaos. I loved “Banshees of Inersherin” even though it broke my heart over Jenny the donkey. I found “Oppenheimer” to be overbearing, overblown, and an assault on the senses.

So this isn’t the first time my reactions to a movie haven’t been those of the crowd. The only thing I found “darkly comedic” in “May December” was more “dark” than “comedic”—not the sort of thing that would make me laugh out loud so much as cringe: the character of Elizabeth, with her performative sincerity (all those smarmy “that means the world”), her pompous imagining that she could discover something “true” within the tangled complexities of badly damaged characters, her predatory exploitation of everyone and everything for the purposes of her “craft” (she can barely wait, after sex with Joe, to grab and read that letter he wrote to Gracie when he was thirteen), her grotesque, narcissistic seductiveness, not just with Joe, but with an audience of high school students.

It was a brilliant stroke, I thought, to have her version of the snake/stockroom/seduction scene virtually mimic the one we see at one point, on a television in the background of her hotel room, from the made-for-tv, “Lifetime”-style movie that is alluded to earlier. She’s reached no more “truth” than a sleazy tabloid version. She’s just more skilled at diving into her own eroticism as a resource, which she does when acting out, word for word, that letter Gracie wrote to Joe, presumably after her first intercourse with him (she tell him how much pleasure she felt with him.) Natalie Portman does a masterful job in performing that monologue. But unlike Shanee Edwards, who interviewed screenwriter Samy Burch, I didn’t find the monologue “hilarious” in any way, so much as powerfully revelatory of Gracie’s fantasy-world and the predicament it put Joe in, and Elizabeth’s self-absorption in “becoming” Gracie. You would think, after reading that letter, that she might feel a tiny bit of shame over he own seduction of Joe. But no, she’s much too immersed in what she can do with that letter, as an actress.

But back to feeling like an alien. I was comforted somewhat when I saw an interview with Todd Haynes in which he clearly didn’t agree with, the notion that “May December” is camp. The interviewer, Juan Barquin, is among those who found the film “darkly amusing”:

Barquin: How do you, as a filmmaker, try to nail that balance between these arguably hilarious moments versus these devastating and uncomfortable scenes without it falling into something that is, for lack of a better word, camp?

Haynes: You know, the term “camp” never occurred to me or anybody during the making of May December. I’m interested in it because we all are and it’s an interesting history, but what I was very interested in is the hyper-interpretive mode that the script puts the reader in. You are completely in a state of interrogating your own views, ideas, and moral grounding, and your presumptions about who’s a good character and who’s a bad character. That keeps shifting as you watch and as the film unfolds.

I thought of strong music, a distanced camera with observational space, a static frame, the idea of those mirror scenes, holding scenes, and single shots. I thought that austerity would be a way to force the viewer to observe this life without intervening constantly and telling you what to think every second. But it needed a strong frame to say, “This is what we’re doing and you guys should think and question what you’re watching.” The music became the way to make that frame really bold.

The “strong music,” (which Haynes later says “breaks every rule of what movie music is supposed to do) may have been Hayne’s one miscalculation. Adapted from Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between, it sounds portentious chords almost like those of a horror movie trying to rivet your attention, prepare you for something gruesome to happen. Haynes: “It has a pensive urgency to it. It was like a warning bell that something was not right or that there was going to be a doomful result to the events unfolding in front of you.” All true. But while this is appropriate to many scenes, at other times it’s so preposterous for the situation (as when Gracie opens the fridge door, and oh, the horror of not having enough hot dogs) that it does seem to signal “this film is a comedy.” Take out the music in that scene and I would have been fine with it everywhere else.

Some viewers found Elizabeth’s line—”It’s what adults do”—after she’s had sex with Joe, who had imagined they had a real “connection,” laughable. But our hearts are so entirely with Joe at that moment—he is righteously disgusted with her—that I don’t know where those laughs are coming from. A friend of mine says it’s because viewers are so uncomfortable with what they’re feeling, that they laugh. OK. I understand that—in theory. It’s just not how I reacted to that scene. Haynes, too, was surprised by audience’s reactions, and had much the same explanation as my friend:

There was this wit, this sardonic humor that was evident from the start in Samy’s script, but we were always trying to play this film extremely straight. I don't think any of us quite realized how much the humor would ultimately play for audiences until we started to show the film to viewers while we were cutting the film and getting feedback. And I almost was taken aback. I was like, this movie is really funny because it's playing with very dark and complicated themes and you're very disquieted by what's going on. The moral ambiguities in the film keep shifting and you keep not knowing which character to align with and what to believe. So the humor is welcome as a way of interpreting this film and experiencing it.

In other words, while Haynes didn’t expect the laughter, he graciously accepts it as a way of audience’s relieving their disquiet with the “moral ambiguities.” But that’s among the things I loved about the film. I can’t say I personally experienced any “moral ambiguity” about Elizabeth. To me, she was a calculating predator from very early on in the film. There were moments, sure, when I shared in her disbelief and discomfort over Gracie’s behavior—when Gracie shows that “What is Peace?” card, for example, and when she body-shames her daughter. But whenever we were taken behind the screen of Elizabeth’s performative “integrity”—when she leaves the set, so to speak—we saw a narcissistic, vile user of people.

I didn’t feel the same way about Gracie, although she was what the tabloids and the law branded as the predator. And of course, she was. Joe was a kid, and she was a grown-up woman who could write a letter to him justifying her own hunger for him—which I can understand; I don’t find her desire perverse or unbelievable—as proof of some kind of cosmic inevitability.

Gracie is manipulative, self-indulgent, self-deceiving. In her need to “control the narrative,” she lies. She orders Joe around. She pressures him into reassuring, comforting, waiting on her. (Ironically, it’s in these scenes, which we see but Elizabeth doesn’t, that more “truth” about Grace and Joe is revealed than comes from any of her probing.) But Gracie isn’t calculating except when she’s trying to best Elizabeth. Sometimes, she confounds her with a tiny bit of truth: “I’ve always been naive,” she tells her. I believe her at thst moment, if what I take it to mean is that she has never looked ahead to consequences, always acted on her desires, expecting things to work out. Yet, especially now that the children are grown and she is middle-aged—and she knows Joe is changing, as of course was inevitable—she’s no longer quite so sure. She has a meltdown over a cancelled cake, and looks to Joe, who eats a piece and gives her what she needs. “Mmmm. It’s so good.” He still loves me and needs me, she thinks; her face is beaming like a teenage girl’s.

Todd Haynes on Gracie:

“There’s an almost stubborn refusal to take anything but the answer that she seeks in life. And yet that is countered by all these ways of playing somebody who needs to be saved and rescued and somebody who wants to feel that she's made almost more feminine and more girlish. In a way, it's obviously a device to deny the age difference between her and Joe and to imbue him with a masculine agency. There are few actors [he’s referring to Julianne Moore here]who can navigate those kinds of permutations with such commitment, nuance, understatement, and then shocking moments of revelation where you just can't believe the extremity of the emotional experience that Gracie's undergoing.”

I’ve been there. I’ve had relationships that damaged other people—and myself—because my emotional need overcame any thoughts of consequences, or what was ethical and not, of what would create horrible trouble all around. In that, the only difference between Gracie and me is that I either “came to my senses” or the world made me do so. And although my life has turned out very differently from Gracie’s, some kind of identification with her was clearly stirred in me. Which is why I blew up when my husband referred, in our conversation, to her “moral failure.” The movie stirred up some things in me—and my husband’s remark triggered my need to justify myself. He didn’t think he was talking about me. But in a deep way he was. I felt chastized. I fought back. We got past it—as I said earlier, we’ve been together over 50 years.

Whatever you think of Gracie, Todd Haynes has never been a preachy movie-maker. He’s less interested in declaring a fixed identity—e.g. Gracie as predator—that he is in the social barriers that place people—especially women— in what he describes in an interview with Elvis Mitchell as the “prescribed domestic worlds” that they find themselves in, struggle against, and sometimes in that struggle “encounter themselves in the margins without even realizing or meaning to be there.”

It’s certainly the case with “May December.” In a rare moment of mutual candor and understanding, Elizabeth tells Gracie, after having coffee with Gracie’s first husband that she can “see how being in a relationship with him, in a marriage, would be isolating.” “Precisely,” Gracie replies, and for a moment they’re like girlfriends. The “prescribed domestic worlds” are the source of struggle in “Mildred Pierce,” “Carol,” and “Far From Heaven,.” too (Probably more could be added here, but these were the ones I reviewed this past week-end) Women (and in the case of “Far From Heaven” men) trying to be what it isn’t in their nature to be.

If one had to identify a villain in any of these films, it’s the “respectable” world—the world of “the center”—that is the most despicable predator: growling under its breath, showing its fangs, ready to pounce, to tear apart, to chase out of town. The world that sends a box of shit to Gracie and Joe. The world that leads Mildred Pierce, in her desperate craving for “respectability,” to raise her daughter Veda to be a monster. The world that tape-records Carol and Therese’s beautiful night together in order to provide ammunition that Carol’s husband could use to take her child away from her. The world that throws Cathy and Frank Whitaker into a marriage of heterosexual normativity and personal misery, and shuns Cathy for becoming “more than friends” (even “just friends” is unacceptable) with Raymond, a Black man.

“Respectable” women see Cathy and Raymond in “Far From Heaven”

In “May December,” the “respectable” world is also one that exploits Gracie’s transgressions and the strangeness of her and Joe’s life together with public representations. Todd Haynes:

This particular story has been intensified all the more because it had an entire national scandal rise up around it, forcing the people involved to be even more resistant to questioning what they had done, and more stubborn about hanging onto their decisions. And all these years later, somebody comes to town to start picking away at what those decisions were and how they arose….

We don't know what's going to happen with these characters when the movie ends. But there's something compelling and contradictory, but ultimately very moving about the fact that these people have pushed back the rest of the world and all of its criticism. What remains is something very personal and very intimate between two people. We can judge it. We can critique it. We can dismiss it. But the fact is, this story demonstrated that people can make these decisions for themselves and survive.

A comedy?

I’ll be eager to know what you all think—not just on the subject of comedy but on any aspects of the film—so please do leave comments!!