Gracie Atherton-Yoo was a 36-year-old woman who had a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old boy. The scandal made national tabloid news. She went to prison. They married. Twenty years later, they live in suburban Savannah with their three children, and an actress named Elizabeth Berry has come to town to study Gracie for an upcoming film about the scandal. Todd Haynes uses this setup to build something far more slippery and unsettling than a standard dramatization of a real-life story. May December isn’t about the scandal. It’s about who gets to tell the story, and what they’re really after when they do.
The film establishes its tone immediately with a melodramatic score lifted from the 1970s that plays against domestic scenes of almost aggressive normalcy. Gracie bakes cakes. Joe tends his butterfly garden. Their home is immaculate. Everything about their present life has been constructed to overwrite the past, and Elizabeth’s arrival threatens to dissolve the careful architecture of denial that holds it all together.
Haynes has always been interested in the gap between surface and reality, in how people perform their identities for themselves and others. May December might be his most direct exploration of that theme. Every character in this film is acting, in one way or another, and the film’s brilliance is in how it gradually reveals that the performances are the point.
The Mirror Game Between Portman and Moore
The relationship between Elizabeth and Gracie is the film’s most compelling element, a psychological chess match disguised as research. Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth as an actress who approaches her role with methodical intensity, mirroring Gracie’s mannerisms, borrowing her lipstick shade, probing her memories with questions that sound sympathetic but serve a predatory purpose. Elizabeth isn’t interested in understanding Gracie. She’s interested in consuming her.
Julianne Moore’s Gracie is a woman who has rehearsed her own narrative so thoroughly that she may no longer know where the performance ends and the person begins. Her breathy voice, her sudden tears, her insistence that the relationship with Joe was a “love story” are all delivered with a conviction that Haynes leaves deliberately ambiguous. Does Gracie believe her own story? The film suggests she has to, because the alternative is unbearable.
The scenes where Portman and Moore share the screen crackle with a specific kind of tension. Elizabeth flatters, mirrors, and subtly provokes. Gracie deflects, performs, and occasionally lets something real slip through the cracks. Haynes shoots their conversations with a precision that turns every glance and pause into a negotiation. Neither woman is fully honest, and the film rewards viewers who track the micro-expressions and vocal shifts that reveal what’s happening beneath the polite surface.
The score, composed of cues from Michel Legrand’s work on The Go-Between, is deployed with what some viewers read as ironic excess and others as sincere emotional amplification. This tonal ambiguity is central to the film’s strategy. Haynes wants you uncertain about whether to laugh, cringe, or weep, sometimes all at once.
The Quiet Reckoning Joe Never Gets
Charles Melton’s performance as Joe is the film’s emotional anchor and, for many viewers, its most devastating element. Joe was a child when the relationship began. He is now a man in his mid-thirties who has never had a life outside this marriage, who has been told his entire adult life that what happened to him was a love story. When Elizabeth’s probing questions and his own children’s approaching adulthood begin to crack the narrative he’s been living inside, Melton conveys a dawning awareness that is almost too painful to watch.
The film gives Joe no big confrontation scene, no cathartic monologue where he names what happened to him. Instead, Haynes shows his reckoning through accumulation: a look in the mirror, a conversation with his adult stepson, a moment with the butterflies he tends as metamorphosis unfolds around him. Melton’s restraint here is extraordinary. He communicates an entire interior collapse through posture, through the way his eyes go somewhere else mid-conversation, through silences that say more than any dialogue could.
The film’s treatment of Joe has generated the most emotional response from audiences, many of whom feel the film doesn’t give his pain enough space. This is a valid reading, though it may also be Haynes’s point. The culture that created the scandal, that covered the trial, that will watch Elizabeth’s film, is not primarily interested in Joe’s experience. He is, as he has always been, the person the story happens around rather than the person the story belongs to.
Performance All the Way Down
May December’s deepest insight is that there is no authentic self hiding beneath the performances. Elizabeth performs empathy to extract material. Gracie performs normalcy to survive her own history. Joe performs contentment because he was never given the tools to do anything else. Even the adult children perform their family roles with a practiced ease that suggests they’ve learned their parents’ coping strategies.
Haynes extends this observation to the audience. We watch these performances, hoping to identify the “real” person underneath, and the film denies us that satisfaction. The closest we get to unmediated emotion is in Melton’s quiet scenes alone, and even those are framed in ways that remind us we’re watching a constructed narrative. The film asks whether there’s a meaningful difference between a sincere performance and a performed sincerity, and answers with an uncomfortable shrug.
Should You Watch May December?
This film works best for viewers who enjoy psychologically dense character studies where the real action happens in subtext. If you appreciate Todd Haynes’s other explorations of identity and surface, particularly Safe and Far from Heaven, this is operating at a similar level of formal control. Those expecting a more conventional treatment of the tabloid source material, or a film that clearly condemns its characters, will find Haynes’s tonal ambiguity and refusal to editorialize frustrating. The film demands that you do the interpretive work yourself, and your reading of the ending will likely say as much about you as it does about the characters.
The Verdict on May December
Todd Haynes has made a film about predation, performance, and the stories people construct to survive, and he refuses to tell you which of those three is the real subject. Portman and Moore play off each other with a precision that makes every scene together feel like a trap closing slowly. Melton delivers the year’s most heartbreaking work in a role that the film itself acknowledges will be overshadowed by the women’s performances. May December doesn’t offer easy answers or comfortable moral positions. It leaves you sitting with discomfort that doesn’t resolve, which is exactly where Haynes wants you.