SparkNotes Version
The Deep Dive (Spoiler Alert!)
May-December: a rather dated term where spring and winter collide, and love knows no bounds – or boundaries, for that matter. Used to describe a romance between two individuals with a jaw-dropping age gap, it's a rather fitting title for a film exploring the unusual relationship between the 59-year-old Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) and 36-year-old Joe Atherton-Yoo (Charles Melton), which blossomed when Gracie was 36 and Joe... a tender 13 (cue the collective shiver).
Enters Elizabeth, played by the captivating Natalie Portman, onto the couple's large waterfront house in Savannah in pursuit of discovering the emotional truth as she prepares to portray Gracie in an independant film based on Gracie and Joe's torrid relationship two decades prior. The Atherton-Yoos' lives with their three children appear idyllic from the surface, and they've seemingly made peace with their scandalized tabloid romance. Yet the dark shadow haunting their relationship is immediately brought to light upon Elizabeth's unsettling discovery of a box of feces at their front door. An unruffled Gracie acknowledges the box with nonchalance – clearly this wasn't their first rodeo... of poo.
Director Todd Haynes isn't one to shy away from exploring the intricate dealings of the female psyche (kudos to "Carol" and "Far from Heaven"), and while he claims that "May December" is only loosely based on the 1997 Mary Kay Letourneu scandal, the parallels are stark, inspired by the simple question: "How could this have happened?" If you're unfamiliar, American schoolteacher Letourneau began a sexual relationship with her sixth-grade student Vili Fualaau in 1996. Following multiple prison stints (along with two prison pregnancies), Letourneu married Fualaau in 2005. The couple ultimately divorced in 2019 – a year before Letourneu's death.
With so much Oscar talk surrounding the film, especially the two female leads, Charles Melton's performance as the stunted man-child Joe takes the cake. Breaking out from his role playing Reggie Mantle on that agregiously absurd Archie comics-inspired CW series "Riverdale," Melton's muted demeanor eclipses the two female leads with his hauntingly demure physicality ultimately unraveling to showcase the resounding trauma he is literally carrying in his internalized weight since being exploited in his youth. For his role, Melton studied "The Graduate" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday," but continuously circled back to Heath Ledger's performance in "Brokeback Mountain" in order to best capture how repression can manifest in one's body.
Beyond his awkward physicality, Joe's stunted mentality is communicated by his soft-spoken, rather imbecile sentences. He texts an anonymous female surreptiously like a teenger who just received their first phone, continuously defers to Gracie (when Elizabeth requested to shadow Joe at work, he responds: "Maybe ask Gracie, she's better at that stuff"), and has no ability to broach the subject matter of his abusive relationship with the woman who claims to love him. As he smokes his first joint ever next to his much more developed teenage son Charlie, he breaks down in tears. Whether the source of his tears was a result of a sudden realization of being an empty-nester stuck with Gracie alone or envy of his son's voyage into college to live the normal adolescence that was ripped from underneath him, that's up to the audience to interpret. While the interspersed shots of Joe safeguarding and raising monarch eggs may have been a bit of a cringe-worthy side-plot, this imagery is an overt analogy to the fact that no one ever protected him from danger in his youth; yet as Joe's blossoming sovereignty of thought evolves with his character's existential realization of his marriage's abusive foundation, he too matures like the monarch eggs to have the opportunity to fly free in this world.
Above all, Joe represents the medium in which white female sexuality is weaponized. What's interesting is the female toxicity, the ability to overpower the male persona, doesn't only come from Julianne Moore's character Gracie – but also from Elizabeth's inappropriately worming her way into the Atherton-Yoo's family dynamic. When pictured crashing the children's graduation lunch, there's obviously no ethical lines Elizabeth won't cross to accurate portray Gracie – including luring Joe into her rental residence under the pretext of fixing her asthma nebulizer. While having sex with Elizabeth meant something to Joe under the misconception of a true connection between the two, Elizabeth's demeanor makes clear that this was just another ruse to better embody the illustrious Gracie. This scene is the prime example of how Elizabeth fails to view the controversial couple as real people, but rather, just intriguing stories for her to study. Just like much of society, Elizabeth is the prime example of how our society tends to sensationalize others' pain without recognizing the human beings behind the headlines.
Back in the 1990s, the Mary-Kay Letourneau case struck a chord in our society – a peculiar fascination as to how such a situation could happen. Prior to "May December," the case was not foreign to me, where I too have been a culprit of falling down internet rabbit holes for hours on end reading the innumerable articles and interviews on the scandal. The shock factor of such circumstances is how notorious serial killer's names become imprinted on our minds decades after their crimes and how the countless True Crime podcasts subscriber numbers simply keep expanding. During its heyday in 2005, tabloid TV show "The Insider" sat down with the newly engaged couple in a smiling interview, focusing on wedding plans and of course, Letourneau's Cristiana Couture gown. How deeply disturbing that our society passed off such a situation as run-of-the-mill and appropriate for a general audience on a weekday. Yet even in the interview, as "The Insider" anchor Lara Spencer questioned the couple on their vows, the abusive power imbalance conveyed in Haynes' flick was at play on weekday television. When Fualaau admitted to Spencer that he's "still stuck on my [his] first line," Letourneau eerily whispered to Fualaau that he didn't have to reveal what he's thought of so far. Following this exchange, Spencer laughed: "You've [Fualaau] just been instructed [by Letourneau]."
While I was initially skeptical that such a film exploring this predatorial relationship was entering our media landscape and continue to feed this fascination into others' trauma, what so many fail to understand about "May December" is that despite the deceptive appearance of complexity and negative reviews claiming the film to glorify child pedophilia and abuse, the film is intentional about who is the victim and who is the abuser. Simultaneouslty, maybe we need to be reminded to hate – and explicitly hate – Moore's character Gracie; truthfully, I didn't hate her per se – I pitied her and her psychologically damaged state of mine. In a world of cancel culture, perhaps understanding doesn't equate to forgiveness, but it does paint a nuanced picture of human complexity.
Regarding the vague ending as Gracie attempts to shoot the ultimate scene of the elicit beginnings of Joe and Gracie's illegal affair in the backroom of a petshop, a growing consensus seems to flutter around the idea of Gracie having not been sexually abused in her youth by her brothers (as Gracie's eldest son from her first marriage proclaimed); thus, Elizabeth didn't actually succeed in understanding Gracie to the extent she sought to on behalf of her role, and was then struggling to find the on-screen authenticity she was looking for as she failed in channeling Gracie's state of mind.
We're taking the opposite interpretation of that scene. Tracking back to the high school theater class where Elizabeth was invited as a guest speaker for the day, one of the more rambunctious student's lewdly asks the famous celebrity about shooting sex scenes. In her upmost serious demeanor, Elizabeth goes off on a detailed explanation on how sometimes a sex scene is extremely mechanical like an orchestrated dance, yet when one loses oneself in the chemistry, it's seemingly real – one forgets the cameras are rolling. In the last scene, we see three back-to-back shots of Elizabeth attempting the petshop scene as Gracie, where in the final take, she requests from her director to roll again, as she is finally able to comprehend the sexual chemistry; hence, she succeeded in channeling the unreadable Gracie.
I don't believe the takeaway from the film is that Portman is giving the greenlight to this affair as she is finally able to empathize with their chemistry – nor is it some campy, comedic approach to explore the subject matter (Still awaiting Netflix to explain why they've submitted the film as a comedy to this year's Golden Globes). At the onset of "May December," when Elizabeth is accused by Gracie's friend for rehashing old trauma by taking on this part, Elizabeth responds "it's a very complex and human story." It's not complex – it's predatorial, but I don't take issue in being reminded how some individual's brains are not programmed to understand that nuance.
In 2020 following Letourneau's death, Fualaau appeared on The Dr. Oz Show, where Dr. Oz pointed out to Fualaau that he was around the same age as his ex-wife when they met. Then he asked Fualaau what he would do if he were interested in a minor. “I’d probably go and seek some help,” Fualaau said. “I couldn’t look at a 13-year-old and be attracted to that because it’s just not in my brain.”
Don't get me wrong, I struggle with this film – and not only for the repetitive, oddly placed piano beats. This film makes one feel a lot of mixed emotions at its core, which is problematic in of itself since neither myself nor Elizabeth should attempt to understand what occurs in a child abuser's mind , but the human searching for empathy can't help but want to understand how some people's brains are programmed differently than others. Yet hopefully for the majority of us, we'll simply never truly understand.
Catch ya when the credits role!
Xx
