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May December, Todd Haynes’ latest, is like a TV movie with the genre’s weakness for the overwrought muted; its understatedly eerie approach to a seamy subject matter makes you shiver. It’s one of Haynes’ most straightforward movies, though it’s consistent with his career-long proclivity to toy with form: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story’s bastardization of the musical biopic with a Barbie-doll cast; Far from Heaven’s pointed repurposing of the visual aesthetics and dramatic excesses of a Douglas Sirk melodrama; Velvet Underground’s shaking up of the talking head-driven documentary, which felt like a mosaic presented as a movie. Haynes’ disruptions are never merely superficial. The plasticity of Superstar had a way of reinforcing the real, for instance, and the repurposing of Sirkian trademarks took what Sirk had already been good at — showing how beautiful, expensive surfaces excel at hiding torment — a step further. 

May December ingeniously plays with TV-movie style to approach a story that would certainly in real life become the basis for one: the tabloid-baiting scandal of an adult woman seducing a seventh-grade boy, their “love” enduring even after the ubiquity of their splashy story, reaching a fever pitch with a prison pregnancy, dies down. The film has a Lifetime movie’s sterile, flat look and the sort of clamorous music — all insistent chords and swooning strings, courtesy of the Brazilian composer Marcelo Zarvos — you’d associate with one, too. 

Those hallmarks decorate a premise that gives May December a meta flourish. A TV actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), is due to star in a vaguely-talked-about project where she plays Gracie (Julianne Moore), a woman who started a life with a middle-schooler, Joe (Charles Melton), 24 years ago, and is coming to the pair’s Georgia hometown for “research.” Elizabeth puts up a front of compassion to gain trust — she tells Gracie early on that she wants, through the project, for her to “feel seen and known” — but the more time both women spend with each other the more uneasy things get. 

Prone to self-victimization, Gracie becomes pricklier, more aware than since maybe her tabloid-fixture days of how she might be being perceived. Elizabeth’s early intentions — or at least the ones she professes — only seem to dilute, the transgressive thrills of her avowed investigations and her hunger for professional ascent clouding her better judgment. Her eagerness to “become” Elizabeth is but another kind of predation; the film provocatively, as the critic Sheila O’Malley recently noted, makes you wonder whether Elizabeth’s transformations, and her means of seeing them through, further obscure her true nature or better evince the person she really is. What these women have most obviously in common are the mixtures of disdain and fascination in their eyes when they look at each other, and the wide chasms between their perceptions of themselves — whose partial unknowability makes each character only more compelling — and how others see them. 

Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman in May December. All photography courtesy of François Duhamel/Netflix.

Elizabeth and Gracie’s walking-on-eggshells relationship keeps May December taut with the kind of suspense that makes you a little suspicious things could bubble into a full-blown thriller. You wait for something to explode — for the disclosure of something at last untouched by the politesse underneath the conversations of people who have just met and want to keep things civil. Working from a script by Samy Burch, Haynes keeps us interested in their accord not dissimilarly from how we might if we were reading about its progression in a tabloid. 

But you never sense the director or the writer making distasteful light out of anything. They’re too in tune with the creepiness and tragedy undergirding Gracie and Joe’s life together, with Melton’s revelatory performance especially indicative of both. In his gait alone you see a man stunted, the toll of normal life experiences either completely quashed or confronted prematurely weighing on him. The only real friendship of his that we see comes from his text exchanges with a woman with whom he’s in a nature club; he’s desperate for connection in a life where everything is in service to Gracie and their kids. Beers are habitually washed down to dull the pain of living a life that ought to belong to someone older; his eyes appear perennially glassy, as if they’d been worn down from seeing a reality where its fundamental wrongness is harder to accept as natural.

Elizabeth’s presence in the home seems to only heighten Gracie’s certitude that she has done nothing wrong. For Joe, it in contrast has an undermining effect, the presence of a roving cocked eyebrow creating new fissures in the stories he tells himself about the life he and Gracie have made. The most heartbreaking scenes in May December tend to have to do with Joe saying aloud what he’s maybe never felt able to openly express: wondering to his teenage son, with whom he’s always struggled to relate, during a bonding moment over a joint on the roof if they’re actually connecting or creating a bad memory; wondering to Gracie, who unsurprisingly lashes out by acting like a 13-year-old Joe had actually always had the upper hand, whether it was even possible for him to agree to anything about their shared lives when he was as young as he was. 

May December is able to have it both ways in the way a classic-sense TV movie rarely can: sate the kind of salacious interest that might arise from a story like the one it tells; actually contend with the life-ruining realities lived by the people on the periphery never afforded anything like power. A last-minute glimpse at the project Elizabeth will star in only reminds us how uncommon it is for a filmmaker’s way of seeing to be as prismatic as Haynes’ own.