Todd Haynes's May December explores a tricky, taboo scenario and there's no way around bluntly describing it: Julianne Moore plays a woman in her early 60's who is married to a 30 year old man, and has several children with him. About 25 years earlier she raped him while he was in seventh grade and it turned into one of those heavily publicized tabloid sensations, after which, like any sordid spectacle, it was simply normalized by all parties involved. The beauty of this script though is in it's willingness to face this difficult subject matter head on; where other films would employ sharp sensationalism, blanket condemnation or even insensitive slapstick (trust me, it's happened), this one is unflinching, direct and somehow pragmatic and compassionate in the same breath. Natalie Portman plays an indie film actress who is set to star in a feature adaptation of this family's bizarre trajectory and her arrival into their circle dredges up all the controversy and psychological turmoil that was no doubt suppressed years ago when the events occurred. Moore is brave for taking on a role like this but her performance nor the script ever treat the character like an outright villain, there are shades of complexity here that make simple judgment impossible and the decades that pass after something so extreme always augments the long term outcome. Charles Melton gives one of the years most staggering performances as the grown up boy, now a man left in the dust of an event he barely had time to process before getting married to his abuser and having kids less than a decade younger than himself. This is a challenging film but it's surprisingly not that much of an ugly or disturbing one in tone, these things do happen and those involved are simply people like us, not tabloid headlines or cautionary tales somehow walled outside the collective human experience. With an ending that refuses to give us the simple answers and concludes on a thunderclap of haunting ambiguity, this is one of the best films of the year.
Review of May December
