You can have great actors, fantastic filmmakers, and breathtaking cinematography—but if you don’t have convincing dialogue, it’s hard to fall in love with a movie. Thankfully, that’s not a problem for master filmmaker Todd Haynes’ latest film, May December (now on Netflix). May December doesn’t just feature some great lines; it has the single best, most unexpectedly moving piece of dialogue of the year.
Written by Samy Burch (who also penned the recently un-shelved film Coyote vs. Acme), the film absolutely crackles with fantastic dialogue. It’s often witty, unexpected, and subtle, with each subsequent viewing revealing more surprises (I’ve seen the film three times, and it only gets better).
The film opens with Gracie (Julianne Moore) and her much-younger husband Joe (Charles Melton) preparing for a neighborhood barbecue at their home. Joe gets the barbecue going, while Gracie puts the finishing touches on a cake. She approaches the fridge quietly and opens the door. Suddenly, heavy, dramatic music cues, as Haynes’ camera crash-zooms into Gracie, as she stares inside.
Gracie looks deeply disturbed—as if all the food has gone rotten. Burch’s screenplay describes her reaction as “a dark cloud… like something terrible has just occurred to her.” As the music fades out, just a couple seconds after it starts, Gracie finally speaks:
“I don’t think we have enough hot dogs.”
It’s at once hilarious and unexpected. The film initially seems to play things straightforwardly, before giving way to sudden, glorious melodramatic flair upon the opening of the fridge. You’d half-expect the film to veer suddenly into a murder mystery from the way she looks into it. But instead, her disturbance may just come from the fact that there may not be enough hot dogs. (In fairness, running out of hotdogs at a neighborhood barbecue would be pretty rough.) Moore delivers the line straight-faced and without a hint of irony—for Gracie, this is a grave situation indeed.
The chaser comes in a swift cut to an overhead shot of Joe cooking meat on the grill. Along with the sound of meat sizzling, we can see clear as day that the grill is absolutely littered with hotdogs. There are a minimum of 50 dogs on display, to various levels of doneness. As the screenplay notes, “There are so, so many hot dogs.” In fact, the only earthly scenario where this wouldn’t be enough hot dogs would be at the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, where this year's winner Joey Chestnut devoured a horrifying/impressive 62 hot dogs. Only then would Gracie’s concern be legitimate. That said, we never actually see inside the fridge—for all we know, it could be filled with nothing but hot dogs. Gracie’s worries seem unjustified at best.
But the reason the line is so impactful is not—gasp!—because of the hot dogs. The real genius of it is how, in just seven words, this sentence reveals so much about Gracie, offering tremendous insight into her character.
Much of the complexity of May December is rooted in Gracie’s seeming naivety, especially when it comes to her relationship with Joe. Through Elizabeth’s interviews with Gracie’s family, the film reveals that her relationship with Joe began when Garcie was married and in her thirties, while Joe was just 13. “Elizabeth’s stated desire to present Grace as ‘complex,’ despite her past crimes … reads as its own critique [of] the ways we rationalize abuse and to what end,” wrote Daily Beast’s Obsessed critic Kyndall Cunningham in a piece about the film’s portrayal of grooming and abuse.
Everything in Gracie’s world is layered in falseness, an unwavering artifice that she wields as armor. People are disgusted with what Gracie did, and what she continues to do as she wields power and control over Joe’s life, yet nobody is willing to speak about it. The hot dogs, then, function as an ingenious metaphor: Gracie is terrified of her picture-perfect facade crumbling down on her, and not having enough hot dogs is more than enough to set off a major imbalance and peel back the layers of the slowly decaying foundation of her life.
This hot dog-fueled fragility is evident in numerous moments throughout the film, particularly in how a small inconvenience can start an emotional tidal wave. The same night as the barbecue, Gracie breaks down because of how Joe reeks of smoke in their bed. Overwhelmed by the scent, Gracie simply cannot believe Joe wouldn’t take a shower before getting into bed; she will hardly let him touch her. In another scene, Gracie is distraught, because a regular customer canceled an order for a cake. Gracie is who needs absolute control over everything, from her marriage to the number of hot dogs in the fridge. And when she doesn’t have it, things get ugly.
This need for control is vital to Gracie’s character. Before we even meet Elizabeth, Gracie alludes to how she wants to be in charge of their dynamic: “All I ask is that she’s polite…If she’s gonna be here, I want her to participate,” Gracie tells a friend. But there’s a deeper meaning behind the word “participate;” she means that she wants Elizabeth to participate by her set of rules. It’s paramount that Gracie keeps up appearances and maintains the stability she’s fought so hard to obtain, and no actress—or, indeed, anyone else—is going to get in the way of that. Not even hot dog-induced anxiety.
