May December
Synopsis: An actor meets with a woman she’ll be portraying in a film. The woman is married to a man she began a relationship with when he was a young teen. They both say it was consensual. Or not. (Streaming on Netflix as of December 2023)
May December has levels. The first, easily accessible level, is a depiction of a messed-up relationship. Next level is a dissection of grooming and sexual predation; readily apparent to any informed 21st Century-er. Top level is an elegant presentation of how the patriarchy hurts men. So, yeah, good to see the idea shown in a non-war movie.
Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) is an actor who travels to Savannah, Georgia to research a role. She’ll be playing real life Savannah-ite Gracie (Julianne Moore). Gracie is notorious because she plied Joe (Charles Melton), her husband, to start having sex with her when he was thirteen-years-old. She went to jail for statutory rape, but not before she became pregnant with their child, whom she delivered while in prison. Did she learn her lesson to leave the kid alone? No. A few years later she gets out of prison and has twins with him. Then they get married.
History and the courts are rife with incidents of men having sex with adolescent girls. In the United States, age of consent varies from sixteen to eighteen years of age. More recent codes have made “close in age” exemptions. For example, if a person is under the age of consent, but their chosen partner is no more than four years older, it’s not illegal. But any more of an age difference than the four years and it’s criminal. The theory being, the two people are close enough developmentally that neither one has a power advantage owing to maturity.
What makes May December so interesting is that instead of the more statistically likely pairing of a younger female and older adult male, the older half of the relationship here is a woman who pursued a teen well under the age of consent.
Screenwriter Samy Burch doesn’t shy away from the creeper element, but lessens the triggering element by staying away from any depiction of a child being lured into a “romantic” relationship. In fact, when we meet Joe, he is thirty-six-years old, with a daughter in college and twins within weeks of high school graduation. His wife Gracie refuses to consider their relationship as anything other than a great romance. Enter Elizabeth…
Elizabeth, looking like a star – not tough when you are Natalie Portman. She’s staying in a rental while in Savannah, but before long she’ll basically embed herself with the family. She’s set to meet the family at home where Gracie and her husband are hosting a BBQ. The first question I had was: how the F do they afford their spacious house on the water? Gracie sells an occasional party cake and Joe is an x-ray tech. As the movie goes along, the insinuation is that Gracie comes from a monied family with deep roots in the area.
Elizabeth is one of the last guests to arrive. Gracie is nervous–worried that the actor won’t play her sympathetically. As unself-aware as we’ll see Gracie to be, she can’t block out reality completely. She knows that her story of two lovers wronged by society and the law will be a tough sell.
Elizabeth, who speaks in a whispery tone that is sometimes shy and sometimes coquettish, tells the tensely smiling Gracie to just go about her business and she’ll just soak in the atmosphere. While Joe and Gracie snuggle on a lawn chaise, a neighbor converses with Elizabeth. She tells the actor that Gracie is such an asset to the community and to please be kind to her. Two girls approach Elizabeth, giggling: Do you live in Calabasas? No, she avers. Sadly, Elizabeth is not neighbors with any of the Kardashians. In fact, it’s little old Savannah that has a scandalous story to rival Hollywood’s exploits.
Elizabeth shadows Gracie at a floral design class. Gracie is good at homemaking arts. When Elizabeth asks her about her childhood or what she was thinking when she first became involved with Joe, Gracie goes blank-faced and says she doesn’t think about the past. Well, that might be for the best. The tabloids and national public opinion were unkind to her. And the courts weren’t understanding either. Gracie does explain to Elizabeth that it was Joe who came on to her. Joe the seventh grader.
Maybe, when Gracie first met Joe at the pet shop where both of them worked part time, she didn’t know that he was a child. Even so, she was a married woman in her thirties. And she already had three kids of her own to care for. Yeah– no seventh grader looks eighteen.
Elizabeth wants other perspectives. And tawdry details. She meets Gracie’s ex and her criminal defense lawyer. The latter says she initially told him that she got caught in an affair. You know, the kind that sends people to prison. Elizabeth even goes to the scene of the crime: the pet shop. The embarrassed owner says that, of course he didn’t know what was going on. But, yes, she can look around.
At first, I was thinking: Elizabeth is going to put a barrier between the knowledge that Gracie molested a kid and her portrait. No. Elizabeth wants to replicate Elizabeth’s mindset. We see her lack of boundaries when she is a guest speaker at the high school’s drama club. She rhapsodizes about professionalism and arousal during sex scenes. The drama teacher is too starstruck to stop her from talking. Some of the kids chuckle, while others look taken aback.
But Elizabeth really goes to town when she makes her way back to the pet room storeroom. According to testimony, this is where Joe and Gracie first had sexual contact. Now if they were a couple of seventeen-year -olds, it would be like, C’mon kids! The customers shouldn’t have to wait to buy kibble while you intercourse! Also, the guinea pigs need to be fed. The fish tanks need cleaning, etc. But Elizabeth doesn’t think about that stuff. No, she needs to get in character. She touches inventory like they are communicating memories of the sexual activity to her. She reverently approaches the exit door like it’s a shrine. A sex shrine, I guess, because soon she is miming foreplay, writhing around with the image of a thirteen-year-old, I suppose. Ick…
It does seem a bit much for Elizabeth to get her head around because in a phone call from her rental house, she tells a producer that the kids they are auditioning look too much like kids. They’ll end up hiring a person who looks like he is a college freshman.
Meanwhile, Gracie is fretting. Sometimes she winds herself up so much that she sobs and then Joe rushes to her side. One time she cried because he came to bed before showering. Another time, she was stricken because a customer cancelled a cake order. When Joe asks what happened, Gracie bitterly cries that the customer had to take care of her sick sister, out-of-state. Yes, the woman sounds very selfish. Joe tries to make things right by showing Gracie how happy he is to be eating a slice of the forsaken cake. Yum…
Poor Joe. He has so little autonomy. Gracie has him playing happy husband. As if marrying him nullifies her pre-consent sexual contact. And the kids. Nothing says love like basically forcing someone into parenthood. Sometimes Joe seems to long for a stolen childhood. He raises Monarch butterflies. Gracie keeps an eye on his outside interest, directing him to move the cocoon enclosure when it looks unsightly. What’s this? Joe is texting with another butterfly husbandry person, exchanging pictures of caterpillar development. He does this privately, hinting that he has a crush. Or maybe Gracie will cry if she sees he’s not focusing on their love. And what a romance story. Elizabeth tentatively shares a construction paper card Joe made for her in seventh grade. She says that she never targeted Joe. Before the “office romance” at the pet shop, Elizabeth explains that she only remembered Joe because, several years earlier, Joe was a child in the new (and only) Korean family in their area. It makes you wonder how willing part of the community would have been to forgive & forget if the kid was one of their own.
While Gracie seems to throw caution to the wind in her sex life, she is reserved and tradition-bound in others. She always presents a pretty picture of herself. And she holds her kids to high standards– as she sees them anyway. She’s impatient with her son’s teen insouciance. When she and Elizabeth take her younger daughter shopping for a dress for graduation, picture perfect mom tells her daughter she’s so brave to choose the arm-baring ‘fit. “I never would have felt confident enough to show off my arms.” Her daughter’s smile turns to a frown. “Maybe I’ll try another one.”
In one eerie scene, Gracie and Elizabeth are in front of the bathroom mirror talking about Gracie’s skincare routine. Elizabeth encourages her to put on her usual makeup. She begins to copy her, swathing her lips in the pink lippie that Gracie favors. Encouraging intimacy, she asks Gracie to do her makeup. This is probably an exercise that Elizabeth learned about at a theater conservatory.
You start to wonder if Elizabeth is going to go back to Cali at all. Hitting a dead-end with Gracie–Elizabeth tells her producer she doesn’t seem to have any shame or guilt– she visits Joe at work. During a lull in his workday, Elizabeth employs a strategy of flatter and question. A softened-up Joe confides in Elizabeth that he’s not a victim. Even if people think he is. Elizabeth gets a wolfish gleam in her eye. Is she going to try and seduce him for research? This is so unfair… here he is, an unwordly guy and now a Harvard- educated, Oscar-winning beauty is flirting with him… wait, I mean the character Elizabeth is doing this. Or is she?
Suffice to say that Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore play off each other masterfully. And Charles Melton? He’s a revelation as Joe. Joe the responsible, but naive man-child. You can see him begin to wonder: has this been a love story?
May December is too sensitive to be a satire, although the audacious pronouncements that Gracie the Predator makes with a straight face will have you tittering. The players’ story will keep you intrigued and entertained without exploitation. Well, the only naked actor is Charles Melton here. I’m sure that Tinseltown power players, Portman and Moore felt in a position to decline nude scenes whether they served the story or not. Not so for Mr. Melton.
Besides the flagrant offenses of the patriarchy in pushing men to make war by glorifying aggression there are the deaths by a thousand cuts. Professions traditionally gendered for women have been associated with feminine qualities: carers and teachers of small children (too nurturing), fashion and design (too delicate), nursing, secretarial and flight attendants (helpers to doctors, business leaders and pilots–virtually all male, back in the day). Until relatively recently, men who pursued those careers were ridiculed.
And sex? Societal insistence on hetero orientation for men. And men refusing sex when a woman offers it? If it’s not suspect anymore, it still begs for an explanation. Worldwide, many boys are raised in cultures where they are taught to pursue sex in a show of manhood. Jokes abound about high school boys getting lucky if a hot teacher offers them sex. Even people who might think it’s funny for a, say, sixteen-year-old boy to have sex with a mature woman would be hard pressed to make a case that a woman cornering a middle schooler is something that isn’t going to mentally damage the kid.
And so May December rightly takes away any salacious component and exposes Gracie as a pathetic exploiter and Joe as a survivor. And Elizabeth? Just as you suspected; a shifty and flaky Hollywood-type. Just don’t say that about Natalie Portman. And Julianne Moore seems okay too 😉
P.S. May December was, as they say, inspired by true events. In the late 1990’s, Mary Kay Letourneau, a 34-year-old married teacher and mother to four children, sexually abused a twelve-year-old boy, Vili Fualaau. She claimed it was consensual. In 1997, she was convicted of statutory rape and sent to prison on a suspended sentence. She was pregnant by the kid and gave birth before she went to prison. MKL got out months later and was ordered to have no contact with the victim. She did. Back to jail, where she had her baby, divorced Steve Letourneau and finished the original sentence of seven years. She was released in 2004 and married VF the next year. In front of 200 guests! I bet they left out the part of the ceremony that goes “If anyone knows any reason why these two people should not be wed, speak now.” No one? Really? Mr. Fualaau filed for separation in 2017. Ms. Letourneau died of cancer in 2020. Over the years, Vili F. has worked, had another baby and reportedly struggled with alcohol abuse. (MLK and VF lived in Washington state.)
P.P.S Savannah, Georgia wants you to know that they do not want to be associated with any fictitious scandals — or real ones.
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