Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore Are Marvels in Todd Haynes’s Dangerously Delicious ‘May December’

In portraying a real, living person, how far should an artist go to get to the heart of their subject? With May December, Carol director Todd Haynes’s new film, Natalie Portman plays a woman probing those boundaries. Her character, an actor named Elizabeth Berry, is trying—with the kind of dogged determination generally reserved for hard-nosed detectives—to make sense of the woman she’s recently been cast as. 

That woman is Gracie Atherton-Yoo. Now in her late 50s, Gracie’s life is simple, ordered; she is a Southern housewife who bakes cakes for a living and arranges flowers just for fun. When Elizabeth makes her way to meet Gracie at her home in Georgia, Gracie wonders aloud if she has enough hot dogs on hand. So what could she have done to warrant a film being made about her life? 

We discover this through flashes of the tabloid covers that helped to pay for her house, through photographs and notes, and later through the stories that Gracie and her family reveal to Elizabeth: In 1993, a 36-year-old Gracie “had an affair” with Joe, the best friend of her then-13-year-old son. (Writers Samy Burch and  Alex Mechanik based her on the real-life Mary Kay Letourneau.) They were in love, Gracie insists, and even after she was caught having sex with Joe in the stockroom of a pet store—something Elizabeth simulates with unsettling ecstasy—and sent to prison, they stayed together. Now, Joe (played by Riverdale’s Charles Melton) is 36. They have twins together and are seemingly happily married. 

All this likely sounds like the makings of a deeply self-serious, Oscar-baiting drama. But while Haynes has managed to both tap into the rapture of forbidden love (Carol) and examine dangerous criminality (Dark Waters) with his recent work, May December is as compelling as a sickle-sharp daytime soap. 

The members of Gracie’s family have their own problems, largely stemming from the quietly judgmental and emotionally volatile woman at their lives’ center. And slowly, Portman’s Elizabeth transforms from a mere observer of this operatic family drama into some version of Gracie herself, as the commitment of her research begins to take its toll. When, sitting before a crowd of high school drama students (including Gracie’s daughter), Elizabeth answers a question about the complicated emotional boundaries of on-screen sex scenes, she’d might as well be discussing her current project: “You give in to the rhythm every time,” she says.