Portman, left, and Moore.Photo:Francois Duhamel /Netflix
Francois Duhamel /Netflix
May Decemberis like a Lifetime movie that’s fallen into enemy hands.
The crude, voyeuristic, maybe sanctimonious pleasure you might find watching, say,Amish Stud: The Eli Weaver Story— the sense that you’ve lifted a rock to take a gander at the slugs and bugs beneath — gives way to something that’s more troubling and elusive, but also a lot funnier.May Decemberwill entertain you while getting under your skin.
Several decades before, Gracie was chum in the jaws of the tabloids: A 36-year-old wife and mom, she had a sexual relationship with Joe, a seventh grader. (They worked together at a pet store.) Pregnant with their child when she went to prison, Gracie later married Joe and, despite the 23-year age difference between them, has resumed her life as a suburban homemaker. It’s as if a tsunami had swept through Gracie’s life, uprooting everything — her first marriage, her reputation, Joe’s childhood — yet after the waters receded she was left standing in exactly the same spot.
Moore with Charles Melton.Courtesy of Netflix
Courtesy of Netflix
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May December.Francois Duhamel / Courtesy of Netflix
Francois Duhamel / Courtesy of Netflix
You don’t for a second believe that Gracie could be so blasé, but you understand why she wouldn’t dwell on it with Elizabeth. Much more mysterious is a moment later in the movie, when Joe(Riverdale’sCharles Melton) comes home to find Gracie alone in the bedroom, wracked with sobs — one of her dessert clients is leaving town and canceling any future orders. She acts as if someone had died.
This odd, sad little scene feels as close as you’re ever going to get to Gracie’s oblique heart — the movie doesn’t offer many more such glimpses, and even so they don’t necessarily create a sense of empathy. Gracie has a rather cruel habit of telling her teenage daughter that her arms are too fat. But this is whyMay Decemberis so fascinating and also so confounding: Like Elizabeth, the movie is trying to approach a woman who’s been branded — not incorrectly — as morally and sexually transgressive. (Gracie is the insect beneath the rock.) Instead she’s revealed to be someone who falls apart over cakes and fat-shames her kid. She remains unnervingly alien.
From time to time he disorients you even more with a flourish of camp excess, courtesy of Marcelo Zarvos’s score: Why should there be an orchestral blast on the soundtrack when Gracie opens the refrigerator door and announces, “I don’t think we have enough hotdogs”? You’d have to ask Haynes. But he might not know, either.
Gracie, on the other hand, is floored when Joe suggests that she initiated the relationship all those years ago in the pet store — no, she counters,hewas the one in control.
Can Gracie possibly see the past this way? Her endless inscrutability — the prickly ambiguity nesting in virtually everything she says — is the core of Moore’s extraordinary performance. It’s hard to think of another actress who can inhabit a role so fully and yet seem so curiously absent. She plays Gracie with the purity of a holy fool.
In that regard, it’s tempting to note that “Gracie” is a close rhyme withcrazy.But what would that prove? “Gracie” also suggestsgrace.
Portman’s Elizabeth can’t begin to grasp this profoundly unknowable woman. Just how woefully her imagination falls short is made clear when, at the end, she’s filming a key scene from her “Gracie” film: Elizabeth is a lousy actress. The unanswerable question is whether she realizes that.
Gracie, on the other hand, may have a glimmer of insight into this interloper’s game. “I am naive,” Gracie tells Elizabeth. “I always have been. In a way, it’s been a gift.” This is a kiss-off and, in its peculiar note of pride, not all that different from Medea’s farewell to her husband after butchering their kids: “You have gambled and lost.”
May Decemberis available to stream on Netflix Dec. 1.
source: people.com
