'May December' Review: Charles Melton is Sensational in Todd Haynes' Latest
May December Boasts an incredible lead trio of Julianne Moore, Natalie Portman, and Charles Melton, with Todd Haynes delivering his best directorial effort since 2015’s Carol.
There needs to be a moratorium on the word “camp” because critics have been regurgitating this ad nauseam when discussing Todd Haynes’ May December. While it certainly has one line that falls into the camp territory near the film's beginning, where Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) realizes that there aren’t enough hot dogs at the barbeque, the film is neither campy nor hilarious. In fact, saying that May December is “pure camp” completely misses the point of what Haynes and screenwriter Samy Burch convey in this dark and emotionally heavy tale that directly examines the psychological effects of grooming through the figure of Joe Yoo (Charles Melton).
Joe has been in a relationship with Gracie since he was in seventh grade, and she was 36 years old. The two got caught having an affair while Joe was working at a pet shop, which led Gracie to be arrested, jailed, and registered as a sex offender. Since then, the two have married and raised children. No one bats an eye on their relationship since they apparently love each other, but it’s clear Gracie has been grooming Joe since they met, and her calculating, almost puppet-string presence that lingers over him slowly torments his mind, even if he doesn’t much think about it.
Enter Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), a popular actress who has landed the role of Gracie in an upcoming independent film and travels to Savannah to meet her and Joe to search for the truth in her character’s portrayal. What begins as a cordial meet-and-greet between the two turns into something far more haunting as Elizabeth begins to peer into Gracie’s mind through Joe and the people who knew her before her arrest, including ex-husband Tom Atherton (D.W. Moffett) and his son, Georgie Atherton (Cory Michael Smith).
Suffice it to say there’s nothing “campy” about a film that tackles grooming and abuse. While Gracie’s relationship with Joe isn’t physically abusive, she consistently manipulates him when they’re alone, either in bed or as they have dinner. There isn’t a single line uttered by Gracie that doesn’t sound cold and calculating and consistently makes Joe feel bad about himself, especially when Elizabeth arrives and takes an interest in him, even if nothing romantic is happening. It’s subtle, but Haynes doesn’t shy away from showing it, and his eventual reaction when he slowly comes to terms with what has happened to him for over twenty years.
Melton is utterly captivating as Joe, still capturing the doe-eyed essence that he somewhat retains to shield him from the truth. However, beneath those beautiful, piercing eyes lies a devastating glare that grows more haunting as the film progresses and Elizabeth peers into “something real.” He slowly starts to break composure, with one of the film’s most heartbreaking scenes occurring as he and his son share a joint, and he begins to bad trip on it, realizing what he has done and what he has been enabling for so long. There’s nothing campy about someone who finally wakes up to the years of trauma he has been undergoing and sees Gracie for who she is while also realizing that he’ll never be able to get out of it now, even if Elizabeth tells him it’s not too late to change course.
While Awards season has just begun, Melton has already won two prizes for Best Supporting Actor, making him one to watch this year. It wouldn’t surprise me if he ultimately wins the top prize: his eyes are a cry for help. And no other actor has ever matched the level of emotional anguish he carries as Joe, not even Robert Downey Jr. in Oppenheimer, the alleged frontrunner of a race no one can truly predict. What Melton achieves here is next-level, with Haynes having now propulsed this rising star to one of the best performers working today.
Moore also gives the best portrayal she’s given in a Haynes film as Gracie. As sweet and innocent as she initially appears to Elizabeth, the more the actor learns about the person she’s playing, the more layers we see peeled off her face. Moore is genuinely bone-chilling here: in complete control of the situation at every turn, despite what Elizabeth thinks she knows more about her than meets the eye. This here is the most terrifying aspect of grooming: the perpetrator fully knowing what they are committing with the soundest possible mind while gaslighting everyone around them in thinking it’s perfectly acceptable for a 36-year-old to have a romantic affair with a 13-year-old when it’s not.
Through the figure of Elizabeth, Haynes attempts to peer further into Gracie’s mind through the artifice of filmmaking. One particular shot occurring in a store sees Elizabeth literally and figuratively mirror how Gracie is seated and positioned and how she acts with her children. Cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt positions the camera through a mirror, resulting in Gracie being shown twice while Elizabeth slowly disappears into her figure. It’s one of the most potent shots of the entire film and an exploration of how acting and filmmaking as a whole can attempt to make us understand more about the world and the people who inhabit it.
In this case, Elizabeth plays the role of a sex offender, someone who shares no remorse for having groomed a child while the now-adult child is still coming to terms with what’s happened. Portman posits Elizabeth as an actor striving for authenticity to capture the essence of the truth of Gracie but slowly realizes that there is more to Gracie than she will ever portray on film. This part of the film doesn’t always work, but Portman remains as equally assured as Moore, a silent observer of years of abuse unfolding in front of her.
All of this coldness is chillingly accompanied by an evocative score from Marcelo Zarvos, who reinterprets and adapts many patterns created by the late Michel Legrand into a cross between a Phillip Glass Glasswork and traditional Legrand. Some of Legrand’s own compositions, such as the theme from The Go-Between, act as leitmotivs that emotionally set the film’s haunting tone. There isn’t a single moment played for camp — it all creeps up under your spine when you slowly realize what you’re exactly watching, just like Joe is waking up from the years of abuse he’s endured under Gracie.
As a result, May December emerges as a deeply uncomfortable and terrifying watch, one that isn’t afraid of directly looking at the effects of grooming and psychological abuse in ways that Sofia Coppola never dared to do with Priscilla. The ones who scream “camp” should be ashamed of themselves, as there’s nothing light or comedic in a movie where grooming is the central point of focus. And once you enter Charles Melton’s eyes, there’s no going back to how horrifying this film becomes and evolves into something far more unsettling than it was set up to be. It’s one of Haynes’ very best movies and one that will hopefully reaffirm his status as one of cinema’s greatest living auteurs.