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      ‘May December’ Review: She’ll Be Your Mirror

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      In Todd Haynes’s latest, Natalie Portman is an actress studying the real-life model for her character, (Julianne Moore), a woman with a tabloid back story.Much of Todd Haynes’s sly, unnerving “May December” takes place in and around a picture-perfect home, that favorite movieland setting for American dreams turned nightmares. This one comes wrapped in a dappled, hazy light that blunts hard lines and brightens every face, so much so that characters sometimes look lit from within. Even the evening has an inviting velvetiness, as if all of life’s shadows have been banished. In characteristic Haynes fashion, though, nothing is as it first seems in this shimmering Gothic, including the light that becomes more like a queasy, suffocating miasma.“May December” is the story of two women and their worlds of lies. They meet when a TV actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), visits Gracie (Julianne Moore), the inspiration for her next role. Gracie lives in a large waterfront house in Savannah with her husband, Joe (Charles Melton), their teenage twins and two Irish setters. They have another kid in college, jobs they seem to enjoy and a complicated history that’s summed up by the box Elizabeth finds at their front door, and which Gracie opens with a shrug of familiarity. It’s feces, she explains coolly, and this isn’t the first such package.That box is a blunt metaphor for the ugliness at the core of “May December” — years ago, Gracie became tabloid fodder after she was caught having sex with Joe when he was in seventh grade — a setup that Haynes brilliantly complicates with his three knockout leads, great narrative dexterity and shocks of destabilizing humor that ease you into the story. The first time I watched the movie, I almost clapped my hand over my mouth during one absurd moment, unsure if I was supposed to be laughing this hard. Of course I was: Haynes is having fun, at least for a while, partly to play with our expectations about where the movie is headed.A progenitor of the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s, Haynes likes to dig into that space between the world that exists (or we believe exists) and the world of appearances. He’s a virtuoso of paradoxes. That partly explains why he’s drawn to the woman’s film, with its focus on ordinary life, its domestic spaces, moral quandaries, political dimensions and tears. These films evoke what the critic Molly Haskell once described as “wet, wasted afternoons” and reveal what lies “beneath the sunny-side-up philosophy congealed in the happy ending.” She might as well have been talking about this movie.Written by Samy Burch — it’s her first produced screenplay — “May December” is a woman’s picture in a distinctly Haynesian key. As he has in some of his earlier films (“Far From Heaven,” “Carol”), Haynes at once embraces and toys with genre conventions. He uses beautiful images (and people), bursts of lush music, pointed metaphors and floods of feeling to provide the familiar pleasures of a well-told, absorbing narrative film, even as he picks it apart at the seams. This can create an uneasy dissonance, and there are instances when it seems as if you’re watching two overlaid movies: the original and its critique, a doubling that works nicely in “May December,” which soon becomes a labyrinthine hall of mirrors.Gracie’s character is loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who in 1997 was arrested for having sex with one of her sixth-grade students, abuse that started when he was 12. She pleaded guilty to child rape and eventually served time in prison, where she gave birth to their first two children. (They later married.) The case generated a predictable tsunami of grotesque media slavering and found putatively serious journalists referring (and continuing to refer) to the sexual assault as a “tryst” and “forbidden love,” language that prettied up the crime as a passionate romance.Gracie rationalizes her relationship with Joe on her own terms, which emerge as Elizabeth gathers intel. As Elizabeth plays detective — she scans old tabloids, interviews family and friends — she helpfully establishes the back story. Gracie isn’t a teacher, and she and Joe met in a pet store, a seemingly incidental detail that takes on poignantly metaphoric resonance as the story unfolds. At one point, Elizabeth also accompanies Gracie and her daughter Mary (Elizabeth Yu) on a shopping trip. When the girl tries on a sleeveless dress, Gracie tells Mary she’s “brave” for baring her arms and not caring about “unrealistic beauty standards.” Mary looks crushed, Gracie oblivious and Elizabeth a bit stunned but oh-so fascinated.At this stage in her process, Elizabeth has begun to imitate Gracie’s gestures and expressions, a turn that Haynes expresses in the tricky shot that opens the shopping scene. As Mary tries on dresses, the women sit side-by-side facing the camera, two mirrors flanking them like drawn curtains. Because of the angles of the mirror, Elizabeth looks as if she’s seated between Gracie and Gracie’s reflection. It takes a beat to read the image and figure out why there are two Gracies, although as Elizabeth slips into character, suddenly there are three.Moore and Portman’s synced performances give the movie much of its weird comedy. Elizabeth guides you into the story, and you’re tagging along when she pulls up to her Savannah digs and later to Gracie and Joe’s home. Portman gives Elizabeth the studied agreeability of someone who has to work to present a friendly front, an effort that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever interviewed a bored film star. Elizabeth is quick to smile, but Portman shows you the character’s brittle affect, so that you see the flickers of hesitation in her eyes and twitches around her mouth. Mostly, you see that Elizabeth isn’t a very good actress. (Presumably that’s why when she tries out Gracie’s lisping voice, she evokes Madeline Kahn.)Gracie doesn’t need to put up a false front because her existence is nothing but a fully committed, melodramatically rich performance that Moore supplely delivers with alternating eerie calm and impressive histrionic mewling and caterwauling. Gracie has embraced her roles as a loving wife and doting mother, and seems to be living in a profound state of denial about what these roles have cost her husband and children, a lack of understanding (and remorse) that establishes the story’s inaugural moral crisis. It’s not at all clear, at first, if Gracie is lying to herself, blissfully self-unaware or just another garden-variety sociopath playing at the American dream, uncertainty that gives the story a frisson of mystery.Gracie and Elizabeth dominate the first half of “May December.” Then, almost imperceptibly, the focus shifts to Joe, and the story grows ever more serious, heavy and very, very sad. Moore and Portman are tremendous, but it’s Melton’s anguished performance that gives the movie its slow-building emotional power. A stunted man-child with a hulking, ponderous body, Joe too has multiple roles as a father and husband, an object of desire and exoticized other. Yet none fit as persuasively, and he’s most at ease in the scenes of him with the Monarch butterflies he raises in little cages. It’s a sweet pastime and a potentially blunt metaphor, one that Haynes handles with enormous, moving delicacy, never more so than when these beautiful creatures emerge from their chrysalises and Joe tenderly watches them take flight.May DecemberRated R for references to the sexual abuse of minors and some adult nudity. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Is ‘May December’ the Most Fun Film at Cannes?

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      The movie stars Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore as cravenly self-interested women. Its director, Todd Haynes, is relieved that festival audiences are laughing.At the Cannes Film Festival premiere of “May December” this week, something happened in the first few minutes that put director Todd Haynes at ease. It took place at the end of the movie’s second scene, as Gracie (Julianne Moore) gets ready for a family barbecue that will be attended by Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a famous actress who is preparing to play Gracie in a film.As Gracie crosses her kitchen and opens her fridge, Haynes zooms in on Moore and plays a dramatic music cue. The viewer is on high alert: Something significant is about to happen! Instead, Moore announces mildly, to no one in particular, “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs.” And the Cannes audience burst out laughing.That’s exactly the reaction Haynes was hoping for. Though plenty of viewers will read “May December” in a straightforward way, the subject matter is so juicy that Haynes more than welcomes a playful interpretation.“I was encouraged that the audience felt permission to enjoy the film,” he told me over coffee, “and appreciate it at the same time.”Haynes may be understating things: “May December” is the most fun movie that’s played at Cannes this year, a well-reviewed entertainment that fest-goers have been quoting nonstop since its premiere. There is a whiff of tabloid scandal at its core, since Gracie is loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, the teacher convicted in 1997 of raping her sixth-grade student Vili Fualaau, whose baby she gave birth to in jail and whom she later married. Gracie and her husband, Joe (Charles Melton), have a similar back story, but when Elizabeth travels to their Savannah, Ga., home to shadow them for a week, they present her with a picture-perfect image of long-married domestic bliss.Still, the strength of their union is predicated on never truly revisiting its origin, and as Elizabeth pokes, prods and asks invasive questions, theirs is a marriage under siege. Gracie will do whatever she has to in order to keep her family together, but Elizabeth is just as determined to crack her facade, and as both women face off in a series of electric encounters, the self-interest that motivates them is often so craven that you can’t help but laugh.“As we were cutting it, it felt funnier than I really knew even reading or shooting the movie,” Haynes said. “We didn’t play it for laughs — it just has a sardonic wit about it.”“I was encouraged that the audience felt permission to enjoy the film,” Todd Haynes said of “May December.”Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersDoes Haynes agree with the critics who’ve called the film campy? “That was never, ever a term I applied to the script or style of shooting,” he said, though he understood why writers might be tempted to use the word: “‘Camp’ is maybe a too catchall term these days for an excited state of reading things, where you’re encouraged to read something against itself at times. And that’s exactly what I hoped would happen, especially with a sense of pleasure involved, and amusement.”In the festival’s biggest bidding war, Netflix prevailed with an $11 million price that should presage a major awards campaign for Portman, who makes Elizabeth’s fully committed insincerity so compelling.“She was so invigorated and excited — like mischievously so — to play with the expectations that people would bring to the movie,” Haynes said. “At first you think Elizabeth will be our comfortable way in to this sordid back story, and then you start to really re-examine who she is and feel that she is not a reliable narrator.”The film could also be an awards breakout moment for Melton, whose Joe comes to the fore in the final act as he movingly scrutinizes the life path he was locked into as the boy at the center of a tabloid scandal. “We were so lucky to find him for this,” Haynes said of the actor, previously best known for “Riverdale.” (Between Melton and the “Elvis” star Austin Butler — last year’s Croisette breakout — the CW-to-Cannes pipeline has become a real thing.)Haynes has been juggling his duties on “May December” with a career retrospective in Paris that has highlighted films like “Carol,” “Far From Heaven” and “Safe” (the latter two also starring Moore), and he has welcomed each as a distraction from the other. “One has to filter it a bit just to survive it all, and it’s heady looking back at my whole creative life and history,” he said. “I would be in pools of tears otherwise.”The retrospective will soon end with a screening of “May December,” and that feels fitting: This is the most mainstream film Haynes has yet made, but it’s still packed with thematic layers, and Haynes welcomes any interpretation you’ve got, be it serious or funny.“If there’s a thinking process that runs parallel to watching the movie, that’s superb,” he said. More

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      ‘Sharper’ Review: The Big Con

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      The film stars Sebastian Stan and Julianne Moore in a baroque but lackluster story of con artists circling a Manhattan billionaire’s fortune.Perhaps phishing emails have taken the romance out of con artistry, but “Sharper” feels downright quaint in its Russian-doll plotting of elaborate scams. That’s no crime in itself, but the movie also confirms that stories about con artists might require more panache, or at least a sense of danger.The movie opens with a rom-com coziness, as Sandra (Briana Middleton) meets Tom (Justice Smith) in his tastefully appointed Greenwich Village bookshop. Their goo-goo-eyed dating ends badly, with the extraction of a large sum of cash. Each chapter of the film then pulls back the curtain on one of the characters. We learn that Sandra previously crossed paths with Max (Sebastian Stan), a smooth operator who is close to the Fifth Avenue habitué Madeline (Julianne Moore).Madeline in turn is dating a billionaire (John Lithgow), who’s about as safe in this setup as a chicken in a shark tank. The false fronts of the plotting are the film’s only reliable kick, and so they’re best left unexposed here, but the general modus operandi hinges on triggering protective impulses and panic responses.Yet this tony-looking film, directed by Benjamin Caron (“The Crown”), feels less poker-faced than prim about its characters and their behavior. The story misses the clinical bravado of David Mamet’s heists, the psychosexual menace of “The Grifters,” or — despite opening with a dictionary definition — the crooked community described in the David Maurer classic “The Big Con.”The film’s biggest trick might be casting Moore, Stan and the positively glowing Middleton and still never quite catching fire.SharperRated R for language throughout and some sexual references. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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      ‘When You Finish Saving the World’ Review: Mother and Son Disunion

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      Julianne Moore plays a parent to a son (Finn Wolfhard) with whom she fails to see eye-to-eye in this comedy directed by Jesse Eisenberg.“When You Finish Saving the World” is, for better or worse, exactly the movie one would expect from the actor, writer and playwright Jesse Eisenberg: wordy, whiny and self-consciously wry. Adapted from his 2020 audio drama of the same name, this slight debut feature alights on a mother-son dynamic so cringe-inducingly toxic that we can sympathize only with the man of the house (Jay O. Sanders), an academic who exists mainly to complain about his own irrelevance.And not without reason, when neither his wife, Evelyn (a firmly deglamorized Julianne Moore), nor their teenage son, Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard), bothers to attend his promotion to chancellor. Evelyn’s exhausted-hippie look and teeny-tiny car fit perfectly with her job at a shelter for victims of domestic abuse, where she oozes the empathy and attention she denies her son. For his part, the perfectly named Ziggy (his head is filled with stardust) is a self-involved twit who cares for nothing except nurturing his professed “passion and charisma,” livestreaming his dorkily fervent folk rock to a rapt audience of international tweens.When Evelyn, her voice thick with censure and disappointment, inquires about Ziggy’s future plans, he reveals aspirations that go no further than acquiring more followers and more generous tips. Where, she wonders, is the darling child who used to accompany her on protest marches? (Pete Seeger’s rousing version of Woody Guthrie’s “Union Maid,” stomping over the film’s end credits, is an unexpected pleasure.) Once, Evelyn dreamed of editing Rolling Stone; now she dreams of having a son like Kyle (Billy Bryk), the sensitive, caring young man whose mother is one of Evelyn’s abused residents. Deciding that Kyle is too special for the blue-collar life he’s contemplating, Evelyn resolves to help him ascend the class ladder, one Ethiopian meal and college application at a time.Set in suburban Indiana for no apparent reason other than Eisenberg’s fondness for the state (we barely see beyond a handful of indoor locations), this dramatically flat picture, too tidily and predictably resolved, is never more than glancingly funny. The milieu is comfortably upper-middle class, but it’s a cold comfort, and much of it doesn’t ring true. Ironically, the movie’s most credible sequences involve Ziggy’s pretensions, emerging from his infatuation with Lila (a sharp Alisha Boe), a politically engaged classmate who writes earnest poetry slamming colonialism. Ziggy doesn’t understand her social conscience, but he wants it, partly because he’s a hollow that needs filling, but mostly because he believes it can be monetized. He’s not interested in developing a point of view; he just wants to learn how to perform one.Eisenberg has already proven himself a smart wordsmith and a knowing performer of emotional unease, but this “World” is a disappointingly shallow tale of narcissism and negligence. When these characters become too tiresome to listen to, though, look at their surroundings: Working with the excellent cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, Eisenberg displays a promising visual instinct, giving the family a home that’s shadowed and sad, spacious yet suffocating. The dinner-table scenes alone are nightmares of estrangement.Casually satirizing the empty suck of social media and a do-gooder impulse that’s practiced solely with strangers, “World” is at times almost cartoonishly cruel. One scene in particular shows Evelyn, in a “nyah-nyah-nyah” singsong, snidely deriding Ziggy’s music. For the first time, in his pained expression, we see the defensive nature of his overweening self-regard; and had Eisenberg used this moment, and others like it, to deepen and enrich his characters, they might have seemed genuinely redeemable instead of simply insufferable.When You Finish Saving the WorldRated R for extreme rudeness and rotten parenting. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Woman in the Window’ Review: Don’t You Be My Neighbor

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      Amy Adams plays a reclusive psychologist who witnesses a crime in a glossy new Netflix thriller.“The Woman in the Window” evokes two emotional states widely associated with the Covid-19 pandemic: real estate envy and the condition of melancholy drift that some psychologists call languishing. The resonance is purely accidental, since this adaptation of a 2018 novel by J.A. Finn, directed by Joe Wright (“Atonement”), was originally slated for theatrical release in 2019. To make a long story short, it fell through the cracks of the Fox-Disney merger and landed at Netflix, where it feels curiously at home. More