This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by editor Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
There are times when you sit down to watch a movie and, almost immediately, you know you’re in. In the case of May December, that happened after about five minutes, when Julianne Moore opens a refrigerator, a dramatic music cue plays, director Todd Haynes zooms in on her face, and Moore says with utmost seriousness, bordering on terror, “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs.”
This moment spoke to me because I, too, often fear that we don’t have enough hot dogs. (That’s not a joke.) But it also set up what would be the film’s magic trick. It’s a tense drama about what’s to be gained and lost by dredging up secrets from the past, and also a darkly comedic thriller. It is campy without being ridiculous, yet almost shocking in its willingness to be goofy. And it is somehow both soapy and deadpan—played so straight and, sometimes even, listlessly, that the major story beats end up crashing through the screen like a wrecking ball.
Haynes’ film, which is now on Netflix, is one of the best of the year, delivering what the youths I follow on social media would call a “mother-off” between Moore and Natalie Portman, who perform a delicious dance of sisterhood and suspicion. While they are as great as you’d expect—I pulled out my best Oprah impression as I skipped out of the theater: “You get an Oscar nod! You get an Oscar nod!”—my favorite performance was from Riverdale star Charles Melton. In a film full of surprises, the combination of this unexpected casting and the fascinating levels of emotionality Melton brings to the role is one of its cleverest.
May December is loosely inspired by Mary Kay Letourneau, the teacher who made headlines in the ’90s after she had an affair with her 12-year-old student Vili Fualaau, had children with him, and later married him. If it wasn’t directly based on this case, there’s no audience member who wouldn’t make the obvious connection. Although, maybe that’s not true; I had a particularly harrowing conversation with a younger colleague in the industry who informed me he had never heard of Letourneau before. At that point, my knees creaked, my back gave out, my hair instantly turned gray, and I began yelling at strangers to “get off my lawn,” despite, in fact, not having a lawn. What must it be like, I wonder, to have gone through life without that woman’s face plastered on every grocery-checkout tabloid and TV screen?
In this film, Moore plays Gracie, who became the center of a national scandal when, at age 36, she was caught having sex with 13-year-old Joe at the pet store where they worked. It’s now 2015, and Gracie and Joe (Melton) have been together for 23 years, are married with children of their own, and are seemingly settled post-controversy in their community in Savannah. There’s going to be a movie made about their relationship, and the actress cast as Gracie, Portman’s Elizabeth, arrives to shadow Gracie and meet the family.
Her presence and her digging dredges up memories from the past that Gracie and Joe purport to have left behind, especially with their twins about to graduate high school. Of course, that’s not the case. Especially when it comes to Joe, we see the toll that repression has taken, and the clarity that was stolen from him because he was so young when he signed on for this life.
Throughout the film, Haynes employs jolts of humor to create distance from the monstrousness of the film’s subject matter. That’s mischievous in its own right, creating an even more upsetting impact when we’re forced to confront the darkness head-on. When we meet Joe, Melton plays him at a fascinating juncture between arrested development and dutiful father figure; he’s so juvenile that Gracie still takes care of him, but tangibly wizened after two decades of raising children.
As an audience, you’re tempted to assume he’s emotionally stunted at the age the affair began. So much so, that any moment that hints at Joe being a manchild elicits huge laughs—one moment in a hotel room with Elizabeth, particularly. But that just intensifies the tragedy. Elizabeth’s digging forces him to excavate all the questions, confusions, and frustrations that he hasn’t just bottled for 23 years, but which have fermented and complicated as he’s gotten older and earned perspective.
His struggle to articulate them—to even feel them—is devastating; you see both the abused child and the resilient man, each needing closure that he’s not sure how to seek. Are we watching a 13-year-old unfamiliar with how to express such extreme emotions, his body trembling and uncomfortable as they combust? Or are we seeing a grown man terrified to unleash the darkness of the past, unsure of what would happen to him—and to his family—if he does?
There’s an element of “who knew?” to the fawning over Melton’s complicated, stunning work in these scenes. He’s best known for Riverdale, a gloriously ludicrous teen drama that isn’t exactly the kind of series you’d expect a prestige film director to cast his next star from, putting him in scenes with Oscar winners. The teen soap-to-Oscar movie pipeline is well-traveled, from Michelle Williams (Dawson’s Creek) to Shailene Woodley (Secret Life of an American Teenager). But we still have our biases that leave us amazed when it happens.
I think Haynes is shrewdly playing with those expectations with this casting: Joe’s complexity is underestimated, so that when he does break down, it’s unmooring. On a meta level, who’d have thought the guy from Riverdale would pull that off, and how fun is it to relish the success now that he did?
Melton has already won the Gotham and New York Film Critics Circle Awards for his work. Here’s hoping that the rest of awards season is fully stocked with hot dogs.
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