Figuring out Todd Haynes' tone in Netflix's May December is just one of its many delights. Throw in two top-tier actors, Julienne Moore and Natalie Portman, and you are in for a challenging serio-comic film experience.
The title pretty much tells us all we need to know with an older woman, Gracie (Moore), having married a much younger man, Joe Yoo (Charles Melton). As if that imbalance weren't enough, the couple became embroiled in tabloid fame.
Into lives that seem tranquil enough comes the outsider, the character who changes things. Natalie Portman's TV actress, Elizabeth, visits to get a sense of Gracie as she plays her in an independent film about the scandal. Elizabeth gets to know the scene a bit too well visiting Joe at his hospital job as an X-ray technician. Artifice and reality begin to merge.
Given that it's Natalie Portman playing Elizabeth and Joe's vulnerable as he was in the pet shop with Gracie, no wonder the original scandal takes wing again with a turn not likely to surprise anyone. It's director Todd Haynes's territory, where a character like Gracie is clueless to a certain extent, allowing the drama to take on comedic undertones where surprises about fellow human beings modeling soap opera characters ring true but no less dangerous than on the tellie.
No scene is more telling about the juncture of reality and romance than when Elizabeth visits Gracie's daughter's high school acting class to equivocate about sexual pleasure during sex scenes. Coupling Haynes's naughty innuendos with Michel Legrand's overtly soap opera music, what seems like a developing tragedy repeating the tabloid circus in 1992 turns into a parody of ordinary folk played by actors who are ordinary themselves. Haynes hits human weaknesses universally.
May December starts with a tabloid set up of older woman-very younger man to a more probing study of motives and maturity, wherein an older woman evades reality and a younger man begins to create his own. Not bad at all for comic melodrama.
The title pretty much tells us all we need to know with an older woman, Gracie (Moore), having married a much younger man, Joe Yoo (Charles Melton). As if that imbalance weren't enough, the couple became embroiled in tabloid fame.
Into lives that seem tranquil enough comes the outsider, the character who changes things. Natalie Portman's TV actress, Elizabeth, visits to get a sense of Gracie as she plays her in an independent film about the scandal. Elizabeth gets to know the scene a bit too well visiting Joe at his hospital job as an X-ray technician. Artifice and reality begin to merge.
Given that it's Natalie Portman playing Elizabeth and Joe's vulnerable as he was in the pet shop with Gracie, no wonder the original scandal takes wing again with a turn not likely to surprise anyone. It's director Todd Haynes's territory, where a character like Gracie is clueless to a certain extent, allowing the drama to take on comedic undertones where surprises about fellow human beings modeling soap opera characters ring true but no less dangerous than on the tellie.
No scene is more telling about the juncture of reality and romance than when Elizabeth visits Gracie's daughter's high school acting class to equivocate about sexual pleasure during sex scenes. Coupling Haynes's naughty innuendos with Michel Legrand's overtly soap opera music, what seems like a developing tragedy repeating the tabloid circus in 1992 turns into a parody of ordinary folk played by actors who are ordinary themselves. Haynes hits human weaknesses universally.
May December starts with a tabloid set up of older woman-very younger man to a more probing study of motives and maturity, wherein an older woman evades reality and a younger man begins to create his own. Not bad at all for comic melodrama.