May December (2023)
Directed by Todd Haynes
Written by Samy Burch
Starring Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, D.W Moffett, Piper Curda
Release Date November 17th, 2023
Published November 15th, 2023
A few days ago I watched David Fincher's new movie The Killer and I was left wondering if that film was intended to be a comedy. Not a traditional comedy mind you, rather a David Fincher comedy. A David Fincher comedy finds humor in a way that is far from typical comedy. It's a humor that either you get it or you don't and the filmmaker doesn't particularly care whether you understand the joke or not. It's a puzzling movie, to say the least. Now, I find myself watching another movie by another famously particular auteur and having the same question: Is this comedy?
Todd Haynes' new movie, May December, starring Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman tells a story that would not, on the surface, seem appealing to Haynes' particular type of movie. The film tells the story of an actress, played by Portman, who travels to Savannah, Georgia to meet the real life woman that she is set to play in a new movie. That woman is played by Julianne Moore and some 30 odd years earlier, she went to prison after she had an affair and a baby with a 13 year old boy, played as a grown up by Harry Melton.
If this scenario sounds familiar, you probably grew up in the 1990s and you recall the story of Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who was caught having sex with a 13 year old student named Vili Fualau. She was arrested and convicted of statutory rape. She became pregnant before heading to prison and went on to marry her much younger baby daddy when she was in her mid-30s and he was only 18 years old. The couple stayed together for over 20 some years before ending their marriage just before Letourneau passed away in 2020.
That kind of trashy, tabloid story would not appear to suit the man who made such elegant movies as Carol and Far From Heaven. That said, both of those movies are about tearing away the blinders that many choose to wear regarding the America of the 1950s and 60s to reveal the trashy, ugly, and awful core that many Baby Boomers, and their parents, would like to forget. In this case, Haynes applies his talents to a story from the 1990s and he's pulling back the veil on a story we'd all put behind us and tried to ignore. We'd all made up our minds about Letourneau and her teenage victim, she was the older person in the relationship and bore responsibility for it.
Haynes doesn't try to change or complicate our memory but he does appear to add some texture and nuance to it. While we laughed at late night jokes at the expense of Letourneau in the 1990s there was a real person there and she did go on to marry her victim. What was that about? Is this a love story? Or is it something more sinister, a case of grooming that was so pervasive in the public that we collectively tried to ignore the fact that it didn't actually end when Letourneau went to prison. The story continued, she married her victim, they had more children and we all turned away to search for the next big scandal.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media
