In May December, Hollywood erases the horror of child abuse.
In May December, Todd Haynes takes the 1997 scandal in which Mary Kay Letourneau pleaded guilty to two counts of felony second-degree rape of a child, and attempts to normalize it as an art-cinema exercise. He changes the facts of a sexual relationship between a 34-year-old schoolteacher and her twelve-year-old pupil and fabricates a meet-cute among younger and older co-workers at a pet shop. Haynes moves the crime from Seattle, Wash., to quaint Savannah, Ga.
The romantic title May December is Haynes’s version of Sex-Offender Story Hour (the latest weapon in the Drag Queen Story Hour wars) intended to warp popular opinion about the sexualization of children by deconstructing its aftermath. (LeTourneau was sentenced to seven years but was paroled after six months.) Haynes does this through the brazen pretense of Hollywood actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) researching the role of the sex offender by visiting the home of ex-convict Gracie (Julianne Moore) and her now-adult victim-husband, 20 years later.
May December represents what academics call “erasure.” Haynes dramatizes fiction to erase the history of Letourneau’s real-life offense, thereby becoming complicit with her crime. He’s fascinated with transgression, the password of French philosopher Michel Foucault, an academic favorite for his promotion of subversive sexuality. May December explores the new normal of Americans adjusting to lawless perversity, even when it stars celebrities. It’s this Sex-Offender Story Hour aspect of May December that causes some people (such as the Golden Globes Awards show) to consider the film funny, nominating it in the Comedy category and honoring the cast for decadence. (Elf comedian Will Ferrell is a co-producer.) Portman and Moore don’t look like average women but resemble drag queens specializing in stealthy passion and uneasy self-control — one a professional parasite and the other a pathetic sociopath, each fronting rictus grins.
Both Portman and Moore are miscast; formerly lovely, they look aged, emaciated, and bedraggled. That they’re directed to renege on the emotional compassion that actors are supposed to have readily accessible (the gift that makes Jon Voight’s and Dustin Hoffman’s performances as outsiders in Midnight Cowboy so effective, to name one example) is what makes the film utterly disgraceful. Moore boldly exposed her pubic hair in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, but this angry, teary characterization reveals nothing.
The Mary Kay Letourneau horror story is a joke to these jokers. Haynes fakes grad-school analysis of domestic melodrama by approving Elizabeth’s Hollywood career calculations (saying her goal is to “represent” women, because she wants them “to be seen”). Yet his directorial charade is exactly the same. Haynes knows the Ivy League and Hollywood ground rules — that he can get away with anything if he broadcasts female sexual license (Elizabeth) and female suffering (Gracie). They evoke Foucault’s Marxist fantasy of power and social control. The idea that the film critiques itself is pseudo-intellectual nonsense out of Brown University (Haynes’s alma mater).
Haynes’s monstrous women are merely ploys; the kindliest character is the overgrown stud Joe Yoo (Charles Melton, in a wooden performance), the abused manchild still seen as weak and immature, despite fathering four children with his miscreant wife. That Haynes carelessly exploits Joe, switching the boy’s racial identity from Samoan to Korean, reveals some racism hidden within progressive politics. (And what’s up with that obvious prosthetic phallus, if not a dusky racist stereotype?) Haynes’s indifference to the harm of childhood sex-grooming (a Drag Queen Story Hour staple) explains why male psychological dangers go unexplored (there are no Samoan or Korean box-office stars). Haynes and Portman seek art-house cred when they push Elizabeth impersonating Gracie as if doing an Ingmar Bergman Persona monologue — or Elizabeth laughably faking orgasm when researching the infamous pet shop where Gracie and Joe first had sex.
What is a filmmaker’s responsibility to truth, to humanity? That’s not Haynes’s question, it’s mine. Film-school student Haynes always imitates better directors — Fassbinder’s social melodrama, Joseph Losey’s studies of decadence (pilfering the infelicitous piano score from Losey’s The Go-Between, from 1971). And Haynes’s inept formalism is a poor version of Losey-epigone Peter Strickland’s high-style irony.
The erased truth behind May December evokes Haynes’s celebrated 1987 short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, made using Barbie dolls, that put him on the map of New Queer Cinema. At the time, it seemed clever and could even be read as sympathetic. But May December is salacious and insidious. Misrepresenting real life, it is a transgressive act of criminal reprieve. Don’t be fooled by another means of normalizing sexual chaos and destroying civilization.