[Minor spoilers ahead if you know nothing about Mary Kay Letourneau or what this movie is based on]

After a long holiday season of family and friends and several nieces and nephews trying to ride my (very small) dog into battle like the cavalry from Napoleon, I finally got a chance to settle in and try to make some headway into my 2024 Oscar gauntlet. Obviously nominations have not been solidified yet, but there are many movies that I’ve yet to see that are in the conversation (Poor Things, Maestro, Anatomy of a Fall, Past Lives come to mind). I wasn’t in the mood to be emotionally destroyed, and I was hoping to avoid any graphic sexual scenes, so that left me with only a few options, of which I landed on Todd Haynes’ May December, available to stream on the Netflix platform.

It’s a funny little movie (in both senses of the word). There’s layers to it and while it remains to be seen how the filmmakers in the Academy will respond to it (some have called them a target of the satire in this movie), many critics seem to be in on the joke.

The film centers Julianne Moore as “Gracie Atherton”, a character loosely based (resisting the urge to say ‘loosely scripted’) on the real-life tabloid figure Mary Kay Letourneau, a schoolteacher with a husband and children who had an affair with one of her 12-year-old students, and subsequently had several children in prison by this underage paramour before marrying him shortly following her release from prison. As if there wasn’t enough there to frame a movie, the film is actually driven by Natalie Portman’s character, “Elizabeth”, an actress who has been cast to portray “Gracie” in a film adaptation of the scandal twenty years later. Elizabeth shadows Gracie for several days to try to understand her psyche and bring “truth” to the character.

A very important note that I had gotten heading into this movie that I think informs the experience greatly is that the film being made within the film starring the Natalie Portman character is a made-for-tv drama, and the implication is that this researching actor is not exactly Oscar material. While I didn’t find this to be boldfaced apparent in the performance, I think appreciating this nuance helps to understand what the movie is doing. The most overt calls to undercooked Investigation-Discovery dramatized true crime entertainment come when the film’s ridiculous piano score undercuts what might otherwise be subtle moments. It’s so dissonant and off-putting, yet the moments it’s used for are so silly, I couldn’t help but laugh just about every time this piano riff was played.

A more subtle nod to this type of true crime dramatization is the films overall lack of subtlety. Big obvious metaphors like Joe’s (Joe is the child-victim-turned-husband-and-father) obsession with caterpillars who get to turn into butterflies, or the mirror shot where Natalie Portman is staged right between two Julianne Moores, or even the choice of giving the Gracie character a lisp so that Natalie Portman has something obvious to mimic later in the movie are riddled throughout. The whole time you feel like you’re watching the made-for-tv movie that they are making within the movie, but you can feel it punched up by the great talent at work. It’s an odd, unsettling feeling layered on an odd, unsettling story.

The last positive to note here is the Charles Melton performance. There has been a fair bit of buzz around Portman and Moore who are definitely working hard here, but about halfway through the movie, I found myself completely transfixed with unraveling the psyche of Joe. He gives an amazing performance, serving docile husband energy before layering in arrested development and lack of impulse control before having a breakdown following a coming of age moment delivered by his seventeen year old son. If there’s one good reason to watch this movie, it’s for former Riverdale star (future Oscar winner????) Charles Melton.

This movie is really interesting, sort of unknowable even though it’s telling you everything about itself, there’s just a lot to think about here. Whether the pieces ultimately fit together to make for a great movie is up for debate. For me, I wasn’t knocked off my feet, I thought the weird balance between “actual good movie” and “made for tv schlock” was a really interesting and the Melton performance will be in conversation for awards season, but outside of that, there’s just nothing about this that made my heart sing. Still a fun movie worth checking out during this wintery ‘inside’ season.

Till next time!