May December Tells a TV Tabloid Story With Exquisite Skill

Todd Haynes, the visionary director of May December, doesn't seem to understand why people are putting his film in dialogue with tabloid-inspired TV movies. In an interview with Variety's Guy Lodge back in October, Haynes expressed some bemusement that his film was being received as having intentional camp elements or was in conversation with ripped-from-the-headlines movies. Haynes sees the film, premiered this weekend on Netflix, as referencing works like Ingmar Bergman's Persona and Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. But while those comparisons are certainly apt, May December can't help but evoke those trashy TV movies that sought to cash in on real-life scandals.

The subject matter of May December, if nothing else, demands some kind of callback to '90s tabloid culture. It's a fictional narrative about a TV star, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) who's visiting Gracie (Julianne Moore), the woman she'll be playing in an upcoming movie, who, along with her husband Joe (Charles Melton), was the subject of a nationally covered sex scandal. Gracie was obviously inspired by Mary Kay Letourneau, who had sex with her then-12-year-old student, whom she was convicted of having raped and later married. Elizabeth's interest in Gracie's story pushes against the boundaries of mere biographical research, becoming a psychologically combative battle between actress and subject.

Letourneau's story will be familiar to anyone who had a TV or perused the magazine racks at the supermarket in the '90s. Network TV had produced movies of the week for decades, but during this period, these ripped-from-the-headlines stories were even more focused on sex scandals. Letourneau was played by Penelope Ann Miller in All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story. Amy Fisher, the teenage girl who shot the wife of her adult lover, Joey Buttafuoco, was the subject of three TV movies on three networks in the early '90s. Pamela Smart, who conspired with her teenage lover to murder her husband, was played in the TV movie by Helen Hunt and was the clear inspiration for Nicole Kidman's character in To Die For.

But May December's nods to TV movies don't end at subject matter. Haynes uses the intrusion of loudly melodramatic music cues to set a foreboding tone that goes so over-the-top as to be slyly funny. By employing a score that is directly interpreting the 1971 costume drama The Go-Between, Haynes may not be intentionally referencing TV movies, but the effect is the same.

Portman's performance also seems to be in the vein of the occasionally exaggerated acting in TV movies. This is not a criticism. She gives a deeply intelligent performance that moves through multiple emotional registers. Her character is a famous actress, but we don't really know if she's a good one. When we watch Elizabeth prepare for her movie's big seduction scene by running through a series of strained pleasure poses, it's the work of someone trying too hard to inhabit her character's transgressions.

There is a kind of gravitational pull to this tawdry story that bends the creative choices in the film (the music, Portman's imitations, Moore's subtle-yet-insistent lisp) inevitably towards the melodramatic. What's so thrilling is that it all works. Haynes may not have been able to avoid the trashy trappings of Gracie and Joe's story, but he doesn't need to. He's already incorporating them into this psychological portrait of two women in competition for which one of them gets to tell their version of the story.

The TV movies of the '90s never had the eye or the resources of Todd Haynes, Julianne Moore, or Natalie Portman to elevate their stories beyond their supermarket-tabloid origins. They also never had the ambition to tell the kind of layered, probing story Haynes does in his film. You can see the obvious difference if you compare it with any of the myriad Lifetime TV movies that persist to this day. But whether intentional or not, May December will make you think about those prurient movies and the people who told them, and what Elizabeth is really trying to accomplish by picking at the scabs of a diseased marriage like Gracie and Joe’s.

May December is streaming on Netflix. Join the discussion about the film in our forums. 

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.