May December (2023)
Director: Todd Haynes
Screenwriters: Samy Burch, Alex Mechanik
Starring: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, Gabriel Chung, Elizabeth Yu

Todd Haynes’ films are hard to pin down. Ever the subversive, the renegade of the new queer cinema movement has a proven track record of destabilizing conventional wisdoms surrounding everything from sex to gender to celebrity to domesticity and the American nuclear family. Unafraid to wear his influences on his sleeve, and to subject them to satire and scrutiny, Haynes wields homage, melodrama, and allegory in his deconstruction of the social, political, and aesthetic contexts in which his characters dwell. His is a cinema of transgression that gets its teeth from a sort of reflexive formalism, for his films frequently call attention to their own artifice. 

Take 2002’s Far From Heaven, for example. In many ways, the film, which centers on a 1950s suburban housewife whose secret affair threatens the sanguine domestic lifestyle she is expected to uphold, is a straight-up remake of Douglas Sirk’s 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows, complete with all the soap and glitziness that defined Hays Code-era Hollywood. The catch is that Haynes’ film is, nonetheless, thoroughly modern in its details—by peppering in subject matter that would have been considered too taboo back in the 50s (even for Sirk, who was considered a rebel in his time), namely interracial and homosexual relationships, Haynes turns the entire genre on its head. Films such as Far From Heaven demonstrate Haynes’ unique ability to firmly situate his work relative to established cinematic traditions—and to then boldly defy them. In this way, Todd Haynes is a filmmaker who always seems to have his finger on the pulse, his films conversing with the past to illuminate the present. 

The present unto which May December, Haynes’ latest, arrives feels particularly elusive—and, fittingly, so does the film. Written by Samy Burch and loosely inspired by the public scandal surrounding Mary Kay Letourneau, the screenplay orbits three central characters: Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), a suburban pariah who was once the subject of a tabloid frenzy surrounding her predatory sexual involvement with a 13-year-old boy; Joe Atherton-Yoo (Charles Melton), the boy, now in his 30s and married with children to Gracie; and Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), a B-list actress who comes to study Gracie and her family in preparation to play her in a movie about the scandal. 

On first glance, such a premise seems tailor-made for the Netflix-patented true-crime-content-machine; and yet May December cleverly co-opts these vapid true-crime precepts, and our twisted attendance to them. Where Far From Heaven leverages melodrama to challenge the genre’s largely sanitized depiction of domestic life in the 1950s, May December weaponizes viewers’ learned appetite for sensationalism to unravel the tabloid mythologies that form around deviant crimes and their perpetrators—and which often exploit the victims. 

Portman’s Elizabeth is the doorway through which Haynes instantly implicates the viewer. Her morbid curiosity to get to the bottom of Gracie and Joe’s strange dynamic largely matches our own. However, as she ingratiates herself among the family, it quickly becomes clear that Elizabeth’s intentions are far more perverse. As Gracie’s mask begins to slip, so too does Elizabeth’s, revealing her obsessive, megalomaniacal fantasy of coveting, or perhaps recreating, Gracie’s and Joe’s lived experience. The ensuing dissonance, heightened by the melodramatic register in which the film operates, not only makes for an unnaturalness that is often quite funny (Marcelo Zarvos’s ostentatious score is a big part of this), but it also makes space for thorny ethical questions surrounding spectatorship, representation, autonomy, and consent—none of which feel overly didactic. 

Instead, in true Haynes fashion, ambiguities stay ambiguous, and the viewer is left to dwell in the gray areas. Neither patronizing nor flattering these characters, Haynes complicates prevailing assumptions surrounding Gracie and Joe by lending them both a degree of agency, and in doing so undermines whatever vague suggestion is made toward a simple sociological explanation for their relationship (e.g. personality disorders, abuse begetting abuse). Actors and outcasts alike, these are characters whose identities are defined by performance, whether of normalcy, security, sincerity, or innocence. Like the many mirrors Haynes frames them in, Portman, Moore, and, perhaps most impressively, Melton reflect and belie their characters’ superficial personas. 

May December comes at a strange moment in time when the popularity of true-crime content feels at odds with flattened conceptions of moral goodness and badness in popular media. What makes the film feel particularly incisive and contemporary—infinitely more so than the titles it is destined to be algorithmically paired with on the Netflix home screen—are the ways in which it converses with this moment and indeed the viewer. Haynes’ latest is, once again, hard to pin down; but it is even harder to forget. 

Score: 22/24

May December is nominated for 4 Golden Globes.

Written by Connell Oberman

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The nominees for the 81st Golden Globe Awards were announced on Monday 11th December, with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie the most-nominated of the films chosen by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

Warner Bros’ Barbie was nominated across 7 categories, including Best Director, Best Screenplay, Lead Actress and Supporting Actor, with 3 nominations in the Original Song category for “Dance the Night Away”, “I’m Just Ken” and “What Was I Made For?”.

Justine Triet’s multi-time European Film Awards winner and the recipient of the 2023 Cannes Palme d’Or, Anatomy of a Fall, was nominated in both the Best Motion Picture – Drama category as well as the Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language category, as was Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. The latter was also nominated in the Best Original Score – Motion Picture category alongside The Boy and the Heron, which is a leading name in the Best Motion Picture – Animated category beside Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

The 2024 Golden Globes will take place on 7th January 2024, and will be broadcast in the CBS in the US and in the UK on Paramount+.

The nominees for the 81st edition of the Golden Globe Awards (2024) are as follows:

Best Motion Picture – Drama
Anatomy of a Fall
Killers of the Flower Moon
Maestro
Oppenheimer
Past Lives
The Zone of Interest

Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy
Air
American Fiction
Barbie
The Holdovers
May December
Poor Things

Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language
Anatomy of a Fall
Fallen Leaves
Io Capitano
Past Lives
Society of the Snow
The Zone of Interest

Best Motion Picture – Animated
The Boy and the Heron
Elemental
Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Suzume
Wish

Best Director – Motion Picture
Bradley Cooper (Maestro)
Greta Gerwig (Barbie)
Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things)
Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer)
Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon)
Celine Song (Past Lives)

Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama
Annette Bening (Nyad)
Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon)
Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall)
Greta Lee (Past Lives)
Carey Mulligan (Maestro)
Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla)

Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy
Fantasia Barrino (The Color Purple)
Jennifer Lawrence (No Hard Feelings)
Natalie Portman (May December)
Alma Pöysti (Fallen Leaves)
Margot Robbie (Barbie)
Emma Stone (Poor Things)

Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture
Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer)
Danielle Brooks (The Color Purple)
Jodie Foster (Nyad)
Julianne Moore (May December)
Rosamund Pike (Saltburn)
Da’Vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers)

Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama
Bradley Cooper (Maestro)
Leonardo DiCaprio (Killers of the Flower Moon)
Colman Domingo (Rustin)
Barry Keoghan (Saltburn)
Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer)
Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers)

Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy
Nicolas Cage (Dream Scenario)
Timothée Chalamet (Wonka)
Matt Damon (Air)
Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers)
Joaquin Phoenix (Beau Is Afraid)
Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction)

Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture
Willem Dafoe (Poor Things)
Robert De Niro (Killers of the Flower Moon)
Robert Downey Jr. (Oppenheimer)
Ryan Gosling (Barbie)
Charles Melton (May December)
Mark Ruffalo (Poor Things)

Best Screenplay – Motion Picture
Justine Triet, Arthur Harari (Anatomy of a Fall)
Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach (Barbie)
Eric Roth, Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon)
Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer)
Celine Song (Past Lives)
Tony McNamara (Poor Things)

Best Original Score – Motion Picture
Jerskin Fendrix (Poor Things)
Ludwig Göransson (Oppenheimer)
Joe Hisaishi (The Boy and the Heron)
Micachu (The Zone of Interest)
Daniel Pemberton (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse)
Robbie Robertson (Killers of the Flower Moon)

Best Original Song – Motion Picture
“Addicted to Romance” by Bruce Springsteen
“Dance the Night” by Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt, Caroline Ailin, Dua Lipa
“I’m Just Ken” by Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt
“Peaches” by Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, Eric Osmond, John Spiker, Jack Black
“Road to Freedom” by Lenny Kravitz
“What Was I Made For?” by Finneas O’Connell, Billie Eilish

Cinematic and Box Office Achievement
Barbie
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
John Wick: Chapter 4
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1
Oppenheimer
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour

For the full list of television nominees, please visit the Golden Globes website.