Todd Haynes’ “May December” is one of those art films in which a handful of characters stew in a rarefied setting, waiting for psychological revelations to arise. There’s something agreeably old fashioned to it: there’s a bit of Harold Pinter here, lots of Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona,” which is visually quoted more than once, and a touch of Tennessee Williams, though “May December” runs far chillier than his work. These types of movies used to be released on a pseudo-regular basis throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, many of them imported from Europe. Until a few days ago, I hadn’t seen one in a while. Maybe not since François Ozon’s “Swimming Pool,” but that can’t be right. That was 20 years ago.
Gracie (Julianne Moore) is a small-town baker and housewife who’s married to a much younger man, Joe (Charles Melton). Their meeting is notorious, as she was married to someone else and in her 30s, while he was 13. They slept together, she was caught and jailed, and they had children and reunited after she did her time. The true story of Mary Kay Letourneau is an obvious reference point for Haynes and screenwriters Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik, and their film is interested in our interest in these sordid, tabloid fiascos. Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) is a C-level actress who’s on the verge of playing Gracie in an indie film that she hopes will build up her reputation. She visits Gracie, Joe, and their children for several days to study them and pick their brains, as well as talk to other people connected to the story. Identities shift and precious symbolism abounds.
Haynes, who famously studied semiotics at Brown, is obsessed by our relationship with melodramas. One of his most devastating movies, “Far from Heaven,” reinterpreted the films of Douglas Sirk for a modern audience, attempting to capture in a more permissive time the sense of the forbidden that drives Sirk’s 1950s-era films, which are rich in internal meanings that, if stated more explicitly, might’ve triggered censors at the time of their release. Haynes shares Sirk’s obsession with unearthing the social prisons that exist in plain sight. See his also devastating movie, “Safe” (1995), in which a wealthy housewife becomes convinced that she’s sick from environmental causes, with terrifying randomness. Both films starred Moore, who is never better than when she’s collaborating with Haynes. They have a legacy to live up to with “May December.”
The film has been praised to the stars, and it has all of those rich contradictions that we’re to expect from Haynes’ work. Gracie and Joe are comfortable but are clearly haunted by the nature of their union. Haynes is far too hip to judge them, but he doesn’t shy away from the creepiness of their relationship. Haynes particularly has fun visually rhyming Joe with his children, so that they all suggest siblings, with Gracie as mommy. The director’s determination to take this relationship seriously, and to acknowledge its roots in pedophilia while likening it to incest, gives “May December” a naughty charge.
Moore, better than she’s been in ages, plays Gracie as the most damaged person in the film. Gracie is characterized by a fascinating series of contradictions: She’s a control freak who nevertheless had a fling with a child, and on top of that, seems prudish. We’re meant to ask “How did this person do that?” The film’s best scene has Moore becoming hysterical because someone cancelled an order for a cake. The person is willing to pay for it, but she’s already made it and now she knows that it will be wasted. Moore turns this moment, which is worthy of Sirk, into a grand rejection of Gracie’s entire life, suggesting that the character’s sense of order is an attempt to maintain dignity after the scandal. There’s also an arrested “little girl” element to her character, living side by side with the controlling mother, which might cause viewers to wonder if Gracie’s been sexually abused herself. We say that we want more complex characters in modern movies. Well, Haynes and Moore oblige.
“May December” is told from Elizabeth’s point of view, and Portman gets many of the film’s tartest lines, but she’s a less challenging character. How many parodies of superficial actors must we endure before the stereotype becomes tedious? Elizabeth sees in Gracie a potential for rehabilitating her career, and Gracie knows that Elizabeth sees her this way. They parry and joust, with a tug of war developing over Joe, who’s never known another woman and whose head is turned by the posh and beautiful Elizabeth.
There are bits with Elizabeth mimicking Gracie that inevitably suggest “Persona” Jr. In a scene in a clothing store, Haynes bisects the image with mirrors, and the moment is both pretentious and a parody of art-movie pretension. Little of this movie, even the tony elements, are to be taken seriously. And Portman’s performance encourages this interpretation, yet Moore and Melton play their roles sincerely and poignantly, throwing off our compass. All of this mixed messaging is intentional, and Haynes’ distrust of the film’s tony qualities only renders it all the tonier. “May December” was conceived as a movie of the week that’s aware of its own superficiality, yet is emotionally resonant despite the alienating devices.
Haynes’ trick here is to take a Letourneau type, who many would call a monster, and turn her into a victim of the vaster monster of the entertainment industry, which feeds off our need for tabloid fodder as a modern mythology. “May December” has a weird cumulative effect, as it’s freighted with endless subtext but somehow feels pointless. The final scene, in which we see the fruits of Elizabeth’s research, turns the movie into an elaborate, self-hating, shaggy dog joke. Haynes shows how trauma is stirred up so that hacks may perpetuate garbage. Gracie’s lisp is a key motif here: a signifier of human frailty that’s reduced by the calculating, untalented Elizabeth to shtick. The last scene is hilarious but sticks in your throat – it’s a callous parody of callousness. I admired “May December” without liking it. Haynes’ efforts here seem squandered. It doesn’t take this much energy and talent to say that media parasitically trivializes our lives.
I saw “Saltburn” only a few hours after “May December,” and let me tell you: that’s a lot of inchoate horniness for one afternoon at the cinema. The film is written and directed by Emerald Fennell, who’s hot off “Young Promising Woman” and following up that outcry against toxic male privilege with a luscious peon to the female gaze.
Fennell is positively gaga over her two stars, Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi, who play Oxford students who fall into a relationship that’s been borrowed from Patricia Highsmith’s novel, “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” and its most prominent film adaptations, Anthony Minghella’s 1999 movie of the same name and René Clément’s 1960 “Purple Noon.”
Keoghan is Oliver Quick (sigh), a hungry striver, and Elordi is Felix, a hunk to the manor born who takes his vast range of opportunities for granted. They fall into a homoerotic dependency on one another, and Oliver quickly grows too accustomed to Felix’s money and mobility. So far, so Ripley, though Elordi throws a refreshing curveball by rendering Felix likeable. Elordi has the talent that Chris Hemsworth keeps pretending to have: He draws you onto his wavelength despite your potential resentment of the fact that he’s built like Michelangelo’s David. Keoghan throws the opposite curveball, coming on like a woebegone dork only to reveal that, wait a minute, he’s also hot … and ferociously well-defended. Fennell builds the film’s signature set piece around how well Keoghan’s hung.
Oliver finds a way to vacation with Felix to his family estate of Saltburn. That name is one of Fennell’s best jokes, suggesting the rub of certain people having this much. A variety of eccentrics emerge, played by Richard E. Grant, Rosamund Pike, and “Promising Young Woman” alum Carey Mulligan in the role of Helena Bonham Carter. The rival to Oliver for Felix’s affection is Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), a family hanger-on and fellow Oxford alum who is the equivalent in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Freddy. But unlike Freddy, who stole that movie, Farleigh quickly wears out his welcome. I lost count of how many times he and Oliver exchanged breathless threats and insults as foreplay, but it’s far too many. Fennell moves her class warriors onto the gorgeous Saltburn and traps them in a holding pattern.
“Promising Young Woman” had a shrewd plot; it was a revenge picture, tarted up with current events, that was taken more seriously than it should have been. Still, it worked because it moved. Making a play for auteur status, Fennell tries to get by on mood alone with “Saltburn,” building an entire movie out of what, for ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley,” was merely the first act. The result is something that is moody, sexy, and so slow and obvious as to compromise your appreciation of all the mood and sex.
The movie does reveal Keoghan to be a star. The actor’s final scene in ‘Saltburn,” designed to be discussed, is a coming-out announcement, an ushering of Keoghan into the inner movie-star stratum. To that end, this self-consciously portentous, sporadically enjoyable movie is persuasive.
“May December” is currently playing at Movieland and will drop on Netflix on Dec. 1. “Saltburn” is now in theaters everywhere.
