'May December' briefing

3 ½ (out of 4)

            It only took me until now to realize Todd Haynes hasn’t whiffed once or ever really come close, which ain’t easy for as many substantial risks in feeling and narrative the man is willing to take on the average project.

Maybe Carol was secured by the wave of LGBTQ arthouse features of yesterdecade, but even that film, a splendid adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt, is just a morsel of his tidy, intimate works of rascally transgression. His whole career is a wicked ride — Poison’s surqueerlism, Safe’s hypnotic hypochondriac disassembly (and first of many fruitful collaborations with Julianne Moore), the Bowie/Wilde/glam-rock zeitgeist kaleidoscope of Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven’s masterful modern Sirk-spin, I’m Not There’s profusely poetic rewrite on the rules of musical biopics (good luck with A Complete Unknown James Mangold), then after awhile Carol’s return to elegant, sumptuous melodrama was his last masterwork. More recently his ode to museums and silent films in the dual-deaf-child-odyssey Wonderstruck, the uncharacteristic legal thriller Dark Waters and the all too frontLOADED Velvet Underground documentary (the harshest way to say I wish the counter-counterculture essay was twice as long) seem to have found Haynes still prone to variety but with less to do with his place as one of Queer Cinema’s giants alongside Gus Van Sant.

So yeah, when you lay it all out there, this quiet king’s latest film May December isn’t all that strange even for all its bizarre, cringe-inducing taboo-probing. Like many Haynes features it’s a dazzling dance of intimacy and showmanship, artifice and reality, though May December specifically proves to be gently haunting, imperceptibly, oddly moving and cruelly funny. It’s unclassifiably one-of-a-kind, not unlike a good deal of his filmography, particularly Poison and Goldmine, which simply couldn’t have been made by anyone else. There’s nothing hetero-divergent going on here, and while from afar this looks like a fresh finagling of the revivified melodramatics seen in Heaven and Carol, it’s really some giddily grotesque, almost subtly black-comic psychological thriller within an art-is-life-life-is-art satirical Hollywood exploitation piece exuding, for all its serenity, some seriously evil cosmic energy. But, like Sofia just did with Priscilla, the grooming is spelled out only from a removed distance, each film bathed in a trance-like haze, an unknowable kind of dark wish-fulfillment and moral trepidation. The grainy, soft-focused, beautifully blocked, warm and welcoming aura is obviously atoned with the stark-raving batshit-bonkers subject matter and the score’s Hitchcockian, almost ironically overzealous score, all the more eerie for how well it imitates the almost aggrandized, symphonic stylizing of long-past film orchestration.

The cornucopia of cinematic meaning, extrapolated moment by moment, is unfathomable given the story’s sum — it seems like some disturbing exploitation/WTF cinema like Saltburn from afar, but even as May December sidesteps stupid, topical rich-rebuking, this movie has infinitely more to mull over inside the rigorously edited, gloriously acted fable on the ethics of teacher-student boundaries and real-life movie adaptations. Which brings me to my mildly sparring leads — my GOD, the fucking character dynamics move like lightning bolts, minute by minute you’re discovering things, shifting the sublime thematic detailing, your alignment of what the movie is and what you’re even watching adjusting scene after wonderfully executed scene.

Moore is in her mode offering perhaps the best of at least five collaborations with Haynes — historically plenty of directors have had their reliable performing counterpart as creative pillar to lean on — John Waters and Divine, John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams, Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich — and Moore is Hayne’s mercurial, matriarchal muse. In May December she’s just so hearth-like and homey in spite of the disarming lisp and, after everything, makes you feel this woman could break down someone also calculatedly polite as Natalie Portman’s quietly vainglorious starlet playing doting detective. Despite Portman’s better, more recent turns like Black Swan and Annihilation, she’ll be more remembered for earlier days like Leon the Professional and the Star Wars prequels… maybe that’s better than peaking with Closer when she’s showing her ass, or Garden State showing her innermost insufferable hipster, or V for Vendetta showing her bald head, all part of her ascension to bouncing between Terrence Malick and the MCU — this is one of her moments, a defining career culmination. So much of the movie’s sometimes spiked satire stems from Portman’s character nestling into a psyche she isn’t prepared for and all the simple, inherent insensitivity of her presence within a dynamic as delicate as a family founded on a grown woman and a teenage boy and the mindfuck of sending their set of offspring through graduation. Not to de-emphasize a diamond in the diamond rough, Charles Melton may not have the illustrious resume but he is still the remarkable highlight, offering an all too human performance in a sea of vanity and posturing. Despite the victory laps for his illustrious co-stars in an already exceptionally stupefying film, Melton gives the most vulnerable, incredible performance of a man backed up with short-circuited development and long-term denial.

This movie could make you think of anything, like the searing absorption of the other à la Persona or even topics  of shirt-tugging discomfort and testy social edginess via Licorice Pizza (STILL the genders reversed is TOO DAMN EDGY) or just the strands of distanced investigative dismay within Spotlight or Day for Night's dismantling of Hollywood's carefully curated reality and twenty other movies not too far off on the cinematic maps and charts. Yet it was so singular, and for such an original movie steeped in seamlessly woven, film-history film selections May December had flavors I could not have expected. Though the threat of adultery looms there’s not one part of this story I could’ve predicted and yet never does the film betray its noblest aims, particularly equalizing empathy even for our most despicable characters, be it the naive or the vain.

Notes on a Scandal wishes it were this incisive or challenging, this warped, twisted melodrama — despite May December's beautiful, nearly unclassifiable ambiguity it remains a completely unsympathetic, unsentimental rendition of the same story (the case of Mary Kay Letourneau look it up!) told in hindsight through an enigmatic, erotically charged psychological minefield, every little bit bearing sharp, reflexive, existentialist truths, subconscious insanity and really invigorating showmanship.