"May December" Provides a Necessary Moral Corrective to Moviemakers
It asks when and how method-acting goes too far
I’d estimate that although over half a million movies have been made, they still haven’t covered about 99% of people and things we can find in real life.
Now comes director Todd Haynes’ “May December,” which finally tackles a forbidden real-life problem I’ve long railed about here and there.
That is: how making movies about real people, who are still living, messes with their lives. And it’s usually immoral to do so, by the measure of nearly any moral system you want to use.
For example, anything with “the true story of” or “based on a true story,” where the characters are based on humans who are still alive. As much as I love “The Social Network” and don’t care for Mark Zuckerberg, I still think that movie was wrong to depict him in the ways that it did.
The premise of “May December” did not look intriguing at all to me, yet the story dynamics quickly grew on me. Basically, famous actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) shows up to interview and study Gracie (Julianne Moore) at her house. Gracie’s a bourgeois 59-year-old American woman, who looks put together on the surface. But she’s got a scandalous past.
What is that scandal? You see, 23 years ago, Gracie had an affair with a seventh grader. The tabloids called it “The Pet Shop Romance,” because that’s where it took place, in a pet shop. They made a laughable, cheesy TV movie about it, too.
Now Berry shows up to Gracie’s house to learn about that affair and all the things that method actors need to know. That includes studying Gracie’s mannerisms, interviewing her ex-husband and other close family friends, and even learning what kind of makeup she uses.
Weirdly, Gracie is still married to the seventh grader, now a 36-year-old man named Joe (Charles Melton). They have three kids. One is graduating high school soon. If you glanced at them, they’d look normal, except Gracie obviously is a lot older than Joe.
Yet it’s all too odd a situation to anyone watching them, because Joe is close to the same age as his kids. One of them, in the course of the movie, even teaches his dad how to smoke.
That’s because Joe has been messed up by the affair and the resultant scandal, as we discover in the film. Who wouldn’t be? In fact, the affair changed everything, and although the family would seem well off and stable on the surface, you can tell how screwed up they are, just because, again, a 36-year-old married woman had an affair with a boy who was in the same grade as her son.
That son, Gracie’s, admits that the whole situation “ruined” his life.
None of that stops Berry from investigating. She is, however, not a pastor or a psychologist, the kind of person who could presumably help the family heal -- Lord knows that Gracie and Joe are still a disaster behind closed doors.
Berry’s not even a private investigator, learning just the facts. It’s far worse than that: she’s an actor who wants to become Gracie, so that she can seem to be “real,” the word she repeats throughout the movie, including in the closing shot.
First, should anybody try to become a female pedophile for the sake of drama? There’s an Art 101 question for you!
As well, to what lengths will Berry go to become Gracie? “May December” takes a dash from the classic film “All About Eve,” which featured a jealous up-and-coming actress scheming to supplant an aging star. But that’s not really the dynamic in this ethical drama. Here, Berry is digging up the past in order to “make art,” which is to say profit from, the Pet Shop Romance that ruined a whole bunch of lives, including many children who have turned into screwed-up adults.
Haynes is a professional director who understands characterization. His framing is uniquely disturbing. Everything is unsettled by where he puts Berry, Joe, and Gracie on-screen. He’s willing to use corners and half-framed faces. Ordinary conversations sound ordinary but look bizarre. If you just watch where the characters are placed in every scene, you can pick up on this movie’s moral viewpoint, I think.
And that viewpoint, in my read, is that Berry is doing far more harm than good, via method-acting methods. Some of those stir up Joe and Gracie in ways they need to be stirred up.
But, in the process, we learn how royally messed up Gracie is. I’ll save those secrets for you to discover; let’s just say a whole team of psychologists needs to descend upon her, stat. Meanwhile, Joe is secretly texting someone in various scenes. Who is it?
We can probably guess what the nature of his texting is, thanks to the movie’s score, which sounds as if it’s from a 1990s scandal-thriller. That makes sense: the Pet Shop Romance was a scandal-thriller that took place in 1992. Berry is resurrecting the past, thus making everyone relive the scandal in their minds. Also, importantly, the score signals to us that some scandal or thrill might come in the third act.
I don’t know if you’ll be satisfied by that last act, though. Not if you watch this movie as a normal thriller that will deliver a twist or three. Haynes possibly is trying to give us an anti-thriller, one that makes us ponder the nature of thrillers that are “based on a true story.”
I found the movie comes down hard on art that exploits. That might be *any* art that represents recent reality involving living people. As Berry says at one point to Joe, he’s just a “story.” Joe responds that, no, she’s talking about his life. And he’s lived a very sad one, being seduced by a much older woman. The movie shows the hard consequences of that, even though Joe and Gracie have been married with kids for almost 24 years.
There’s another dig that “May December” wisely makes on method acting. And that’s best stated for me in question form: how much can you really know another person so that you can act like them?
The movie challenges Berry’s methods of investigation by showing us what she can see of Gracie and Joe, and then what she can’t see. Berry is certainly not privileged to know what they say in private to each other. She doesn’t also glean, I think, what metnal disorders Gracie might have. At one point, she’s even possibly scammed by a demented character, given possibly false information about Gracie’s past. (It may or may not be true; we don’t know, yet we can imagine Berry might use it.)
In other words, Berry observes just part of Gracie’s life, and that’s what she bases her “real” performance on. It’s not only fragmentary. It has possible real-world consequences, such as dredging the past up for Joe, or really bothering Gracie and Joe’s kids, some of whom resent a Hollywood invader coming into their home to talk about the old scandal, for self-serving purposes.
“May December” comes out on Netflix this Friday, December 1, and I bet they classify it as “thriller.” If so, that’s really a mis-classification. It’s more a cerebral drama about a bunch of topics that movies haven’t really talked much about.
That’s because, of course, the focus is on their possible immorality, on their exploitation of real people who have done bad things.