'May December' A Review

May December is a melodrama inspired by the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal. Elizabeth(Natalie Portman), an actor, goes to spend time with Grace(Julianne Moore) and Joe(Charles Melton) as she will be playing Grace in an upcoming indie movie. Grace and Joe met when Grace was Joe's teacher and they began a relationship when he was 13 and she 36. After Grace gave birth to their first child in prison and she was released they were married, 23 years later, enter Elizabeth.

Portman and Moore are two of the great actors currently working, of course they are excellent. Melton is good and holds his own with the difficult material and opposite the two Oscar winners. The supporting cast doesn't have much to do as the main focus is on the three leads. The actors are all fine but the material doesn't do anyone involved any justice.

Visually the film is rich and alluring, as a craftsman Todd Haynes is still at the top of his game, but both the talent of the cast and the team behind the production design is rendered pretty much irrelevant by how utterly exploitative the story itself is. 

The film invites us to revel in the salaciousness, the drama, the darkness. It pits the two women against each other in an inversion on Single White Female, it thrills, it scandalizes, but what it absolutely doesn't do is provide any insight or catharsis. None of the characters, ultimately, change at all. It occasionally invites us to try to understand these characters but then immediately invites us to laugh at them or feel sorry for them. It wants to have its cake and eat it too but ultimately, when you boil it down, it is simply a shameless Lifetime movie knock off with an awards contender production and cast. Just because it looks great and is well acted doesn't change what it is which is pure schadenfreude viewing. And at least Lifetime typically has the decency to pay their subjects life rights which the filmmakers in this instance did not and contend it is simply "a story" not the "Mary Kay Letourneau story".

A beautifully crafted piece of cinema that has all the wrong things to say.

Currently streaming on Netflix.

Don't See It.