May December

MAY DECEMBER   ***1/2

Todd Haynes

2023

IDEA:  Over two decades after a woman began a scandal-provoking relationship with a 13-year-old boy, to whom she's now married with children, an actress comes to town to visit her in preparation to play her in a movie.

BLURB:  Mirrors appear frequently throughout May December, but they’re not exactly visible during their most significant occurrences. Echoing the haunting final shot of his 1995 film Safe, Haynes turns the screen itself into the mirror as his actresses peer out at us from the other side. Lacking the ego-defining configuration of mirror/subject in the same image, our perception is subtly destabilized: are we seeing the real thing or the reflection? It’s a question entirely emblematic of May December, an impeccably slippery psychological drama that’s continuously interrogating ambiguous relationships between truth and fiction, authenticity and performance, what people say and do and what they believe. The particular quotient of any of these things is never clarified in Samy Burch’s script nor through the masterfully layered performances of Moore and Portman, who create a shifting dynamic of power that leaves us wondering who’s really playing whom. With its scandalous subject matter, coiled eroticism, and juicy games of predation and subterfuge, May December is always on the verge of breaking out into Grand Guignol luridness, but Haynes denies the impulse. Pointedly resisting the exploitative sensationalism under his microscope, the director films in muted, washed-out taupes and grays while cleverly avoiding sordid recreations of the primal incident. The soft, glassy flatness of the images and the crashing score may suggest a true crime television serial, but Haynes isn’t interested in uncovering a crime or explaining psychology. As in the vacuous suburban domesticity of Safe, the shivery strength of May December is how it agonizingly chips away at seemingly stable social roles, narratives, and identities that are revealed to be anything but.