![]() It takes a while before we realize that Elizabeth is actually famous for playing a veterinarian on a dismal-sounding network drama called “Norah’s Ark.” The performance is peppered with details you can only get from someone who has been in the public eye for their entire adult life, like Elizabeth’s practiced way of accepting compliments with a polite indication that the conversation is over. We start the movie assuming Elizabeth must be a well-respected actress, in part because of how the other characters respond to her but mostly because she’s played by Natalie Portman. The comedy in Samy Burch’s screenplay is usually a little drier than that. Natalie Portman (left) and Julianne Moore in "May December." (Courtesy Francois Duhamel/Netflix) When a class clown asks a cloddish question about shooting sex scenes, she calls his bluff by answering too honestly, Portman getting carried away and repeating the student’s name in a breathy whisper that had me convulsing with laughter. A scene in which she visits Gracie’s daughter’s drama class might be the funniest thing Haynes has ever filmed. Yet Portman plays her as the most unhinged character in the story, snooping around under increasingly dubious motivations and lapsing into spells of erotic derangement. In any conventional movie, Elizabeth would be our audience surrogate, uncovering the tawdry secrets of the Atherton-Yoos. “May December” is Portman’s most dazzling work yet, sidling up to Gracie and absorbing her mannerisms mid-conversation like a Method vampire. She’s a case that Elizabeth the actress can’t quite crack, though not for lack of trying. ![]() With eggshell nerves and a pronounced lisp, this is one of Moore’s most overtly stylized performances, endlessly demonstrative yet also stubbornly unreadable. Gracie dismissively refers to them as “his bugs.” She’s a piece of work, his wife, constantly asserting her helplessness as a form of control. Elizabeth comes calling right before their two youngest are about to graduate high school, a stressful enough weekend without some B-list celebrity traipsing around town asking questions about old sleeping dogs everyone would rather let lie.Īll grown up and about to be an empty-nester at the age of 32, Gracie’s victim/husband Joe Yoo is touchingly portrayed by Charles Melton, who I’m told starred as Reggie on the CW’s horny Archie Comics adaptation “Riverdale.” Entirely guileless, he’s a big, musclebound slab of innocence who works at the hospital and breeds butterflies in the family room before setting them free when they come to maturity, a metaphor that’s a bit much even for a movie as arch as this one. They’re still together to this day, living in the same island community just outside Savannah. Insisting that they were in love, she had the little boy’s baby while she was in prison, then they married and had twins after Gracie got out. Twenty-odd years ago, a happily married, 36-year-old pet shop manager named Gracie Atherton (Moore) was arrested for having sex with a seventh grader who worked at her store. ![]() Natalie Portman stars as Elizabeth Berry, a popular television actress doing research for a role in an upcoming indie film based on a 1990s tabloid sensation. “May December” is Haynes’ fifth collaboration with his muse Julianne Moore, and like their greatest hits “Safe” and “ Far From Heaven,” it’s another entertaining and unnerving exploration of the gaps between the lives we live and the stories we tell ourselves. His breakthrough film, 1987’s audacious - and still illegal to screen - “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” was the original Barbie movie, telling the tragic tale of the pop singer’s struggle with anorexia using a cast comprised entirely of plastic dolls. ![]() What just happened? What is this movie? The thrillingly discombobulating “May December” is the latest postmodern provocation from Haynes, a master semiotician who has spent the past three-and-a-half decades investigating the ways in which we process images and how our self-perceptions are shaped by storytelling. “I don’t think,” Moore gravely intones, “we’re going to have enough hot dogs.” ![]() The camera comes crashing into her face with a wobbly zoom straight out of a cheesy 1970s docudrama and we brace ourselves for a shocking revelation. It’s the kind of music you’d hear in a 1930s radio drama right before someone gets murdered. The fabric of the film rips early in director Todd Haynes’ “May December.” During its opening moments, we’re watching the bustling, banal preparations for a summer barbecue at an upscale Savannah home when Julianne Moore’s harried hostess opens the fridge and suddenly, a thunderous cascade of piano chords overwhelms the soundtrack. Facebook Email From left, Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo and Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry in "May December." (Courtesy Francois Duhamel/Netflix) ![]()
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