Todd Haynes (2023)
The Go-Between is making a surprise comeback in 2023 cinema. L P Hartley’s novel – or Joseph Losey’s film of the novel – was an evident inspiration for Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. Now the Losey picture’s music by Michel Legrand, rearranged by Marcelo Zarvos but still unmistakable, is the first thing that you hear in Todd Haynes’s May December and dominates the soundtrack throughout. It’s bound to, of course; Legrand wrote plenty of better scores but this one, love it or loathe it, is unforgettable. (That’s a main reason why I loathe it – as an overblown, enduring earworm.) When last I saw The Go-Between, in 2018, other aspects of the film were stronger than I’d remembered – which made the intrusive score all the more irritating. Its effect in May December is very different: rather than distracting from an absorbing drama, the music supplies what little urgency the Haynes film has.
The story is set in 2015, in Savannah, Georgia. Actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) arrives there to research a film role she’s about to play. She does this chiefly by spending time with Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), the notorious local celebrity whom she’ll incarnate on screen; Elizabeth also meets and talks with members of Gracie’s family. In 1992, Gracie, then in her mid-thirties, was caught having sex with a thirteen-year-old boy – her son’s schoolmate – in the stock room of the pet shop where she and he both had jobs. In prison, Gracie gave birth to the child of this just-teenage father, Joe Yoo. At some point after her release, they married. More than twenty years on, Joe (Charles Melton) and Gracie are still man and wife, and have had three kids together: the original love child, Honor (Piper Curda), is a college student; the couple’s twins, Charlie (Gabriel Chung) and Mary (Elizabeth Yu), are about to graduate from high school. Gracie now runs a home-baking business. It soon emerges that this is kept going by a few steadfast friends; even so, she and Joe have a social life together, despite being shunned by other locals. Gracie is virtually estranged from her elder son Georgie (Cory Michael Smith), Joe’s contemporary, who makes some kind of living as a musician and still lives with Tom Atherton (D W Moffett), Gracie’s first husband.
Samy Burch’s screenplay is based on the real-life case of Mary-Kay Letourneau, née Schmitz. Born in California in 1962, she was raised in ‘a strict Catholic household’; the political career of her father, who held office as a Republican senator and congressman, ‘was permanently damaged [in 1982] when it was revealed that he had fathered two children out of wedlock during an extra-marital affair with a former student’ (both quotes from Wikipedia). In the mid-1990s, Letourneau, married with four children, was an elementary school teacher in Seattle. She began having a sexual relationship with one of her pupils, a thirteen-year-old boy called Vili Fualaau. She pleaded guilty to second-degree child rape and, while awaiting sentencing, gave birth to Fualaau’s child. Through a plea agreement, which proscribed contact between her and Fualaau, Letourneau received a very short custodial sentence. After completing this sentence, she resumed her relationship with Fualaau, who was still a minor. This resulted in a prison sentence of several years, at an early stage of which she gave birth to another child fathered by Fualaau. Letourneau and her husband divorced in 1999. In 2005, after her release from prison, she married Fualaau. They separated in 2019. Letourneau died the following year.
Gracie is potentially the more interesting of the two principals in May December. She’s someone who (she tells us) moved from state to state in her early years. Despite her itinerant experience and the persisting animosity towards her in Savannah, she has remained there with a husband who’s a continuing reminder of her crime. Her staying put, like her marriage, seems less an act of defiance than to reflect Gracie’s lack of guilt or regret about the behaviour that made her name (and, at the time, national as well as local news headlines). Elizabeth, in contrast, is a fairly familiar figure: film dramas centred on actors’ involved relationships with the characters they’re playing go all the way back to George Cukor’s A Double Life (1947), and probably much further. In terms of social background, Gracie is so different from Mary-Kay Letourneau that it would seem hard for the latter’s family to complain about the film, let alone litigate. In spite of all this, and though Todd Haynes and Samy Burch show some nerve in not condemning Gracie, they’re too cautious to make her the main character. Elizabeth, with the lion’s share of screen time, ‘embraces’ the role of Gracie predictably. She visits the pet-shop stock room, where she simulates, solo, the throes of passion. She does a Q&A for the high-school drama class of which Charlie and Mary are part; they have to sit and suffer as Elizabeth describes how exciting it is to play a morally dubious character. Most unsurprisingly of all, Elizabeth tries to seduce Joe, he takes a shine to her and they eventually have sex. In other words, Elizabeth’s arrival in their lives causes Gracie and, especially, Joe to review what had seemed a settled relationship, and brings it to crisis. Apart from the loss of one home-baking client, however, the narrative conveys little sense of whether or not Elizabeth’s presence in Savannah revitalises local censure of Gracie.
Todd Haynes’s cachet as a film-maker derives largely from two dramas with women protagonists – Far from Heaven (2002) and Carol (2015). Without vilifying either Elizabeth or Gracie, Haynes shows less sympathy towards them than towards their counterparts in those earlier films – Julianne Moore’s character in Far from Heaven, the Carol duo played by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. That’s fair enough and less of a problem than that he also struggles to make Elizabeth and Gracie interesting – or even entertaining, despite the storyline’s teetering on the edge of farce. Elizabeth is as gullible as she’s exploitative: after accompanying Gracie’s clan to a meal in a restaurant to celebrate the twins’ graduation, Elizabeth is asked by Georgie if she could get him a job as a movie music supervisor; he offers in return the information that Gracie as a girl was sexually abused by her older brothers, that that’s why she herself became an abuser. Elizabeth swallows this whole until Georgie’s claims are scornfully dismissed by his mother; Elizabeth seems to swallow the dismissal whole, too. She has no sooner got Joe into her bed than she inadvertently reveals she’s chiefly interested in him as a ‘story’; he swiftly heads back to Gracie for a tortured heart-to-heart. Events like these – and Gracie’s meltdown when she loses the order for pineapple upside-down cake – seem to be taking May December into more broadly comical territory but Haynes doesn’t go there tonally. He thereby avoids coarseness but you get to wondering if that might be preferable to his film’s slow burn to nowhere.
Julianne Moore’s playing has more substance than that of anyone else but her underwritten character limits what she can do. I don’t understand why Charles Melton’s performance is receiving such acclaim and even prizes. I found this young actor (whom I’d not seen before) wooden, especially in Joe’s more emotional moments. Although Joe clearly didn’t suffer arrested development on the physical side, I was never sure if he was meant to be feeble-minded. In the smaller roles, Cory Michael Smith at least gives Georgie a bit of edge. In the final sequence of May December, Elizabeth is on set, making the film in which she plays Gracie. After a couple of takes, the director’s happy with what he’s got but Elizabeth pleads for one more take, convinced ‘it’s getting more real’. You could have fooled me. It may be the whole point of the film that Elizabeth’s ‘research’ is merely an ego trip – but, if so, that’s an unoriginal idea. Besides, Natalie Portman’s polished, hollow acting fails to supply the ambiguous tension needed for suspense: you always assume that, for Portman’s Elizabeth, playing Gracie is a vanity project. Some of the many positive reviews for May December have likened it to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). To merit that comparison, you need to do a bit more than have women in the two main roles, make one of those roles a professional performer, and include a scene where the leading ladies’ faces, side by side, look into the camera together. Other admirers of the film have praised it as wildly melodramatic. You could have fooled me again but at least this may mean that Michel Legrand’s music for The Go-Between has finally served a useful purpose.
22 November 2023