Todd Haynes is one of contemporary cinema’s most distinctive auteurs. He’s an eloquent and original formalist who regularly inspires indelible turns from his actors. He’s also a writer who continually re-invents the art of biopic filmmaking: Haynes’s breakthrough short film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) told the tragic tale of the doomed singer using stop-motion animation and a cast of Barbie dolls; Velvet Goldmine (1998) used fictional characters, an original soundtrack, and a plot borrowed from Citizen Kane (1941) to dramatize Glam-era relationships of Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and David Bowie; six actors, including Cate Blanchett, were cast to play the part of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There (2007). Hayne’s new film lays fiction over the disturbing crimes of Mary Kay Letourneau. It’s a movie about acting featuring great turns from both Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, and it’s a movie about infamy and fragile realities that could only be made by Todd Haynes.
May December recalls Velvet Goldmine with Haynes creating new characters, situations and settings to explore Letourneau’s crimes and their aftermath. In 1997, a 35-year-old, married mother of five, and Seattle school teacher, Mary Kay Letourneau became pregnant with the child of her 13-year-old student. She groomed and sexually assaulted repeatedly for a year, and her story was a tabloid sensation. Letrouneau pleaded guilty to two counts of secondary rape before returning to the boy and having a second child with him before he was 15. Letourneau ultimately served six years in jail and the couple were married for 15 years before divorcing in 2019. Letourneau died of cancer in 2020. In May December, actress Elizabeth Berry (Portman) arrives at the Savannah, Ga., home of Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Moore) — Berry is doing research to play Atherton-Yoo in a film. The former pet store manager is now married to Joe Yoo (Charles Melton) whom she first raped when he was 12-year-old employee at the same pet store. The couple’s last two — of three — children are leaving for college, and Joe is nurturing the monarch butterflies that he raises as part of an online environmentalist community.
Portman’s take on Berry will remind viewers of her transformational spin in Darren Aronovsky’s ballet masterpiece, Black Swan. Don’t be surprised at award nominations for Portman whose meta-performance is as much about the artifice of acting as it is about double-faced personas and malleable personal values. Moore is predictably strong here, too, and she should probably expect red carpet invites as well. But for me, it’s Melton who steals the show with a third act turn that brings a heartrending breakthrough to the constricted trauma at the middle of this tense psychodrama that Haynes plays like a cracked Hallmark Channel melodrama.
Haynes’ most recent biopic was his film Dark Waters. That movie was a very conventional take on attorney Robert Bilott’s case against DuPont for poisoning the water supply in Parkersburg, W.Va. That film was a legal procedural that may have demanded a more straightforward profile of the lawyer and the plaintiffs he represented, but May December finds Haynes back to his innovative ways and re-imagining — again — how fictional filmmaking can shine an unexpected light on true-to-life stories and real villains and victims. Haynes has made a habit of defying expectations when it comes to his blending of truths and fictions in his cinematic profiles. In May December he’s able to uncover what German filmmaker Werner Herzog has described as “a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual.”
May December opened at the Belcourt Theatre on Nov. 17. Go to www.belcourt.org for times and tickets. The film is also streaming on Netflix.
Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.