New & Now: May December
Todd Haynes's based-on-real-life-events drama successfully manages to be empathetic, creepy & darkly funny all at the same time.
Why did she do it?
When the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal, arguably one of the most shocking stories of the late 90s, broke, the primary reaction (after appalment, obviously) was confusion: why did she do it? Women, we’ve been taught, are the nurturers, the ones far more likely to be prey than predators. We don’t like to think that they’re acting on some base, primal urge, like men who victimize underage girls. What was going on in Letourneau’s head when she preyed on 12-year-old Vili Fualaau, her student, turning statutory rape into a long-term relationship, defying court orders to continue seeing him, having his children and later marrying him?
Letourneau, who died in 2020, defiantly took no responsibility for her actions, alternating between claiming she didn’t know that what she was doing was a crime, and claiming that Fualaau pursued her. Fualaau, for his part, has remained a cipher, passively agreeing in an interview that he was the instigator of the relationship, though in recent years he’s reportedly come around to accepting that he was the victim of a master manipulator who stole his youth1. But the question remains: why did she do it?
Todd Haynes’s May December is loosely based on the Mary Kay Letourneau story, and does not make much of an attempt to explain anyone’s motivations, focusing instead on the long-term effects. The Discourse will undoubtedly center on the fact that the film does not make it abundantly clear that an adult should not commit statutory rape, as Haynes expects his audience to already know. Appropriate punishment isn’t meted out, because it’s already happening.
Actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) travels to bucolic Savannah, Georgia, to research an upcoming role. She’s to play Gracie Atherton-Yoo, once the subject of a worldwide scandal after sexually assaulting Joe, her 13-year-old co-worker at a pet store, then later giving birth to his children and marrying him. After serving some jail time, Gracie (Julianne Moore), now nearly sixty, lives quietly with Joe (Charles Melton), in his mid-30s, as their two younger children are about to graduate high school.
For all outward appearances, despite the circumstances behind their relationship, Gracie and Joe live a bizarrely normal, even boring life, save for the occasional box of shit that’s mailed to their house, and Gracie casually mentioning that her older son was Joe’s seventh-grade classmate. You know, no big deal.
Elizabeth is surprised but also impressed by Gracie’s seeming lack of remorse. She barely acknowledges that there’s even anything unusual about the situation, let alone how much it impacted the lives of everyone involved, particularly the children from her first marriage. In her defense (if such a thing exists), everybody else Elizabeth talks to, even Gracie’s first husband, seems reluctant to call the situation what it is (deeply weird at best, twisted and morally repugnant at worst), choosing instead to just say mildly complimentary things about her and letting she and Joe live in relative peace. It seems impossible to buy the handsome but shy and awkward Joe as any kind of “seducer,” not at 36 and certainly not at 13, despite Gracie’s insistence that he initiated sex with her, and yet by all appearances that’s what everyone has chosen to believe.
As Elizabeth spends more time with the family, however, her initially friendly interactions with Gracie grow chilly, while at the same time, Elizabeth becomes more interested in the reticent Joe, the real mystery in all this. Gracie realizes that, in letting Elizabeth in, the veil of normalcy she’s desperate to maintain is slipping, and that she’s not in control of the narrative that Elizabeth is creating for her character. For Elizabeth, it’s all grist for her performance, and how she chooses to present Gracie to the world.
Playing Bergman-esque “two sides of the same coin” characters, Moore and Portman are both chilling. A bizarre relationship forms between Gracie and Elizabeth based on mutual manipulation: Gracie needs Elizabeth to believe she’s not a monster, while Elizabeth needs Gracie to believe she cares about the situation for anything other than what she can mine from it for her movie. At no point does Elizabeth ever actually express how she feels about Gracie, or what she did. She’s impassive when Gracie tries to pass herself off as a normal suburban mom who has a cute little side gig as a baker, because she’s a registered sex offender and can’t get a job anywhere else. There’s no confrontation scene, no moment when Elizabeth tries to force Gracie into admitting that she’s the villain in this situation. She’s not there to pass judgment, but rather to collect information, even if that means getting close to Joe and passing herself off as a confidante, using him in a different but no less harmful way than Gracie.
Portman and Moore are as good as they always are, but the real stunner here is Charles Melton as Joe, fast-tracked against his will directly from adolescence to adulthood. Like Gracie and Elizabeth, he’s acting too, miscast as a typical suburban husband and father, barbecuing, watching This Old House, and puttering around the yard, facing empty nest syndrome at the ripe old age of 36. He’s treated like a peer by his children2, and like another son by Gracie, with no outside interests or hobbies save for raising monarch butterflies, which Gracie dismissively refers to his “bugs” and treats as though they’re toys he needs to clear out of the room whenever company is coming. The only time he gets to be a man (as he understands what that means, at least) is when he has to comfort Gracie during her frequent sobbing meltdowns, away from where anyone else can see.
Alternating resentment with guilt, above all else Joe is desperately lonely, trapped in his marriage to Gracie not just because of responsibility for his children, but because there’s simply nowhere else for him to go. There’s nowhere Joe belongs, except perhaps for a sexual assault survivor’s group, and that hollow, aching sadness comes through every time Melton is on screen.
Much of the critical discussion around May December concerns whether or not, despite its unsavory subject matter, it’s intended to be campy. It’s entirely possible I don’t understand exactly what “camp” is (though I’m not sure a lot of other people do either), but save for one outright hilarious scene involving a dramatic music stinger, a slow zoom, and Moore gravely remarking “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs,” things feel fairly straightforward here. At no point does it minimize or treat the subject of statutory rape cavalierly. In fact, it posits some uncomfortable questions, such as why Gracie, who repeatedly raped and emotionally abused a child, has been allowed to live a relatively normal life, in a nice waterfront house, unrepentant for her crimes.
There’s a fascinating arrogance to her showing her face around town, where her ex-husband and older children still live, going to school events, enjoying a comfortable existence. It suggests that Joe isn’t the only person she’s slowly, methodically bent to her will. “She always knows what she wants,” a friend tells Elizabeth, and it’s one of those moments where it’s what isn’t said that resonates more than what is.
Letourneau and Fualaau eventually divorced, but never really lived apart, and he was reportedly at her bedside when she died of cancer, in what surely must be the most serious case of Stockholm Syndrome known to man.
In a moment that effectively combines humor and heartbreak, Joe’s son walks him through smoking a joint for the first time, shocked that he’s never tried it before.