May December (2023)
Director: Todd Haynes
Screenwriters: Samy Burch, Alex Mechanik
Starring: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, Gabriel Chung, Elizabeth Yu
Todd Haynes is a filmmaker whose work resists easy classification. Throughout his career he has challenged conventional narratives about gender, sexuality, celebrity and family life, often using homage, melodrama and allegory to expose the social and aesthetic frames that shape his characters. Haynes’ films frequently call attention to their own artifice while destabilizing familiar genres; he borrows visibly from cinematic history and then reconfigures those references to reflect contemporary tensions. That reflexive formalism gives his films a transgressive energy that interrogates both content and form.
An early example is 2002’s Far From Heaven, which deliberately evokes the look and mechanics of 1950s melodrama to critique the era’s sanitized view of domestic life. Haynes borrows Douglas Sirk’s visual grammar while introducing subject matter that would have been taboo in the 1950s—interracial and same-sex relationships—thereby turning the genre inside out. This ability to position a film within a historical tradition and then subvert it is a defining trait of Haynes’ cinema: his movies speak to the past to illuminate present complexities.
May December, his most recent feature, arrives at a moment when audience appetite for true-crime storytelling and tabloid spectacle is especially pronounced. Inspired loosely by the public scandal involving Mary Kay Letourneau, the screenplay by Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik centers on three principal figures: Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), a suburban woman who was once the subject of intense tabloid scrutiny for a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old boy; Joe Atherton-Yoo (Charles Melton), the boy grown into adulthood, now married with children to Gracie; and Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), a mid-tier actress who visits the family to research Gracie in order to portray her in a film dramatizing the scandal.
On the surface, that setup might read like another iteration of the true-crime formula that populates streaming platforms. But May December deliberately co-opts those familiar pleasures and uses them as a critical instrument. Where Far From Heaven used melodrama to reveal the repressive moralities of the 1950s, May December weaponizes our cultivated appetite for sensational stories to expose how tabloid narratives simplify, exploit and mythologize people. Haynes examines how public fascination can prey upon private lives, and how representation itself becomes a form of extraction.
Natalie Portman’s Elizabeth is the audience’s surrogate, a curious performer whose interest mirrors our own desire to understand and dramatize scandal. At first, Elizabeth seems a straightforward investigator of character: professional, methodical, intent on capturing Gracie’s truth for the screen. But as she becomes more entangled with the family, her motivations shift. Elizabeth’s curiosity hardens into a troubling obsession—an urge not only to represent Gracie but to possess and reenact her life. As masks slip throughout the film, boundaries between observation and appropriation blur, raising uncomfortable questions about authorship, voyeurism, and the ethics of storytelling.
Haynes stages these tensions within a melodramatic register that at times produces dark humor and at other times yields acute unease. Marcelo Zarvos’s score amplifies this tonal oscillation; its overt emotional cues sometimes feel intentionally overblown, underscoring how narrative framing shapes our moral responses. Rather than delivering didactic answers, the film insists on ambiguity. Haynes refuses to categorize the characters simply as victims or villains, instead presenting people who perform identities—performance that can be defensive, strategic, sincere or theatrical.
Julianne Moore and Charles Melton give layered, restrained performances that complicate easy judgments. Gracie and Joe are neither straightforwardly monstrous nor wholly sympathetic; they are complicated by history, agency and the distortions imposed by public attention. Portman’s Elizabeth functions as catalyst and mirror, revealing both the family’s contradictions and the impulses that drive those who would dramatize them. The result is a film that interrogates representation itself: who gets to tell whose story, and what is lost when personal trauma becomes public spectacle?
May December feels especially pertinent now, when true-crime content and celebrity scandals are shaped by algorithmic distribution and voracious audiences. Haynes’ film resists the flattening effects of that ecosystem by insisting on ethical complexity and formal self-awareness. It places spectatorship at the center of its inquiry, compelling viewers to question their own appetite for sensational narratives even as it seduces them with well-crafted drama. The film is elusive, often discomfiting, and stays with you after the credits roll.
Score: 22/24
Rating: ★★★★★
Rating: 5 out of 5.
May December is nominated for 4 Golden Globes.
Written by Connell Oberman
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