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Critic’s Pick
In Todd Haynes’s latest, Natalie Portman is an actress studying the real-life model for her character, (Julianne Moore), a woman with a tabloid back story.
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‘May December’ | Anatomy of a Scene
The director Todd Haynes narrates a sequence from his film starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.
Hi, I’m Todd Haynes, and I’m the director of ‘May December.’ [DOOR OPENS & CLOSES]: “Now, this is silly.” “This is actually very serious business.” “If you say so.” So in this scene, Natalie Portman, who is playing an actor, Elizabeth Berry, who’s planning to portray the character that Julianne Moore plays, Gracie Atherton-Yoo, in a story about the origins of this scandalous relationship that took place over 20 years ago, where Gracie seduced a 13-year-old boy. And in this scene, she literally is, as actors do, looking at the way Gracie applies makeup, and her makeup choices. And so like many scenes that you will see in the film that take place in rooms with mirrors, the scene is shot with the camera occupying the place of the mirror. “You know, I think that it would be better if I just did this to you.” And so the actors are performing directly into the lens of the camera when they are looking at the reflections of themselves, and they look just off the lens at the reflection of the other actor. What’s really interesting about the scene is, that usually Natalie Portman’s character is in the position of interviewing people and asking questions and trying to collect information to help her in her transformation into portraying this woman. Here, it’s Julianne who starts asking questions about Natalie’s character and Natalie, Elizabeth’s life. “So, did you always want to be an actress?” “Always.” So, you start to hear more about Natalie’s character than we’ve ever heard in this scene. “I wanted to be on Broadway. And when I told my parents, I was nine or 10, they were so disappointed. They said, honey, you’re so much smarter than that.” “What did you say? Are you smarter than that?” “I don’t know. I don’t know.” And there’s an intimacy that starts to emerge between the two of them, and a sense that, wow, are these women going to find a kind of safety in each other rather than a sense of threat, or how far is this going to go? And that’s the sort of atmosphere that the scene conjures I think for the viewer as you’re watching. But in the end, man, as a director of great actresses that I’ve been lucky enough to mark my career by, this was a particular astonishing day to watch these two women. “What was your mother like?” “She was beautiful.” And so a shot like this is a great idea, but it doesn’t work unless you have Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman. And so the silences and the breaks and the little bit of laughter is really what’s happening, and it gives the viewer a lot to chew on. [MUSIC PLAYING]
By Manohla Dargis
- May December
- NYT Critic’s Pick
- Directed by Todd Haynes
- Comedy, Drama
- R
- 1h 57m
Much of Todd Haynes’s sly, unnerving “May December” takes place in and around a picture-perfect home, that favorite movieland setting for American dreams turned nightmares. This one comes wrapped in a dappled, hazy light that blunts hard lines and brightens every face, so much so that characters sometimes look lit from within. Even the evening has an inviting velvetiness, as if all of life’s shadows have been banished. In characteristic Haynes fashion, though, nothing is as it first seems in this shimmering Gothic, including the light that becomes more like a queasy, suffocating miasma.
“May December” is the story of two women and their worlds of lies. They meet when a TV actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), visits Gracie (Julianne Moore), the inspiration for her next role. Gracie lives in a large waterfront house in Savannah with her husband, Joe (Charles Melton), their teenage twins and two Irish setters. They have another kid in college, jobs they seem to enjoy and a complicated history that’s summed up by the box Elizabeth finds at their front door, and which Gracie opens with a shrug of familiarity. It’s feces, she explains coolly, and this isn’t the first such package.
That box is a blunt metaphor for the ugliness at the core of “May December” — years ago, Gracie became tabloid fodder after she was caught having sex with Joe when he was in seventh grade — a setup that Haynes brilliantly complicates with his three knockout leads, great narrative dexterity and shocks of destabilizing humor that ease you into the story. The first time I watched the movie, I almost clapped my hand over my mouth during one absurd moment, unsure if I was supposed to be laughing this hard. Of course I was: Haynes is having fun, at least for a while, partly to play with our expectations about where the movie is headed.
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A progenitor of the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s, Haynes likes to dig into that space between the world that exists (or we believe exists) and the world of appearances. He’s a virtuoso of paradoxes. That partly explains why he’s drawn to the woman’s film, with its focus on ordinary life, its domestic spaces, moral quandaries, political dimensions and tears. These films evoke what the critic Molly Haskell once described as “wet, wasted afternoons” and reveal what lies “beneath the sunny-side-up philosophy congealed in the happy ending.” She might as well have been talking about this movie.
Written by Samy Burch — it’s her first produced screenplay — “May December” is a woman’s picture in a distinctly Haynesian key. As he has in some of his earlier films (“Far From Heaven,” “Carol”), Haynes at once embraces and toys with genre conventions. He uses beautiful images (and people), bursts of lush music, pointed metaphors and floods of feeling to provide the familiar pleasures of a well-told, absorbing narrative film, even as he picks it apart at the seams. This can create an uneasy dissonance, and there are instances when it seems as if you’re watching two overlaid movies: the original and its critique, a doubling that works nicely in “May December,” which soon becomes a labyrinthine hall of mirrors.
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