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 categorization. A defining voice of the contemporary queer cinema movement, Haynes consistently challenges established narratives about sex, gender, celebrity, domestic life, and the American family. He borrows freely from cinematic history—homage, melodrama, allegory—and then twists those influences to interrogate the social and aesthetic frameworks that shape his characters. Haynes’s cinema often calls attention to its own artifice, creating a deliberate distance that sharpens its subversive impulses.
Consider the director’s 2002 film Far From Heaven. Ostensibly a 1950s melodrama about a suburban housewife whose private life threatens a picture-perfect domestic existence, the film knowingly channels Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. But Haynes updates the genre with modern, taboo subjects—most notably interracial and same-sex relationships—forcing audiences to reconsider the sanitized portrait of midcentury domesticity. Films like Far From Heaven illustrate Haynes’s ability to place his work in dialogue with cinematic traditions and then undermine them, using past forms to illuminate contemporary concerns.
Haynes’s latest film, May December, continues that practice while stretching into new ethical and psychological territory. Written by Samy Burch and loosely inspired by the public scandal surrounding Mary Kay Letourneau, the screenplay centers on three principal figures: Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), a woman who became a tabloid spectacle after a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old boy; Joe Atherton-Yoo (Charles Melton), the boy now grown into adulthood and married to Gracie with children; and Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), a B-list actress who arrives to research and prepare to portray Gracie in a film about the scandal.
At first glance, that premise resembles the true-crime fodder that populates streaming platforms. Haynes, however, deliberately reframes the material. Where Far From Heaven used melodrama to complicate midcentury ideals, May December turns the audience’s appetite for sensational stories back on itself. The film examines how tabloid narratives are constructed and consumed, how they reshape victims and perpetrators alike, and how representation itself can become a form of exploitation.
Elizabeth functions as the viewer’s proxy—her curiosity mirrors our own, and through her perspective Haynes implicates the audience in the moral ambiguities at play. Yet Elizabeth’s interest proves more complicated and darker than mere professional research. As she embeds herself in the family, her motives reveal a growing obsession: a desire not only to portray Gracie but to possess and reconstitute Gracie’s life. That escalation creates a disquieting feedback loop between observer and observed, raising questions about authorship, power, and appropriation.
Haynes stages these dynamics within a melodramatic register that often tips into the absurd, and that tonal blend is both unsettling and, at times, wryly funny. Marcelo Zarvos’s score amplifies the operatic quality of the proceedings, heightening the sense that characters are performing roles—of normalcy, innocence, confidence, or victimhood—rather than being fully legible people. Haynes refuses to reduce his characters to simple archetypes. He grants Gracie and Joe agency, complicating easy sociological explanations for their relationship and resisting straightforward moral judgments.
Portman, Moore, and Melton bring layered performances to their roles, reflecting and subverting the outward personas their characters adopt. The film’s power comes from that refusal to resolve contradictions. Ambiguity is intentional: Haynes leaves moral certainties unsettled so viewers must sit with difficult questions about consent, culpability, and the ethics of representation. Rather than preaching, the film invites reflection.
May December arrives at a moment when true-crime entertainment is ubiquitous and public reactions to scandal are often polarized and performative. Haynes’s film is acutely attuned to that cultural moment. It exposes the mechanisms by which scandal is packaged, how empathy can be manipulated, and how storytelling can both humanize and exploit. For viewers seeking tidy answers, this film may frustrate; for those willing to inhabit its uneasy gray areas, it offers a provocative and indelible experience.
Score: 22/24
May December is nominated for 4 Golden Globes.
Written by Connell Oberman
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