Gracie Atherton-Yoo has a happy family, close friends and a successful local baking business.
But Gracie’s wonderful life is built on the most precarious of foundations and in the first few minutes of Todd Haynes’s “May December,” things begin to come apart. Gracie, played by Julianne Moore, receives both an unwelcome package in the mail and then a visitor shows up – Elizabeth Berry, played by Natalie Portman, an actress who plans to portray Gracie in a movie.
Gracie, we learn, has a past: She seduced her now-husband Joe (Charles Melton) when he was in middle school and went to jail for the crime, but these days hides behind a broad smile and powerful sense of denial. But Elizabeth is a masterful manipulator too, and her probing and prodding – done in the name of truth, although her motives are almost as suspect as her methods – crack the family’s foundation.
Like Haynes’ films “Carol” and “Far From Heaven,” “May December” strives to use the artifice of melodrama (and occasionally camp, both aided by a moody score) to dig deeper. The film is loosely inspired by the story of Mary Kay LeTourneau, a teacher who became a tabloid sensation in the 1990s; she pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree child rape after sexually abusing a 12-year-old middle school student who fathered two of her children and later married her (though they separated shortly before her death in 2020).
“I was trying to understand how Gracie’s relationship with Joe could even have come into being and Julianne pushed me to really check out the Mary Kay LeTourneau stuff more and I started to really lean into it,” Haynes said in a recent video interview, referring to Moore; the pair have worked together four times prior to this film.
The film is in select theaters now and arrives on Netflix on Dec. 1. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. What drew you to the screenplay?
What’s so interesting about how it’s all staged and set is that you’re seeing all those layers that have built up over the years that enabled this family somehow to survive that original event and do very normal simple things like raise a family and take kids to soccer practice and pick them up from school – all those things that help us distract ourselves from the bigger, harder questions about our lives.
Q. Right, there’s this calcification in a way and then Elizabeth comes along and even if she’s not going to find the truth she will make Joe peel away some of those layers and think about his truth differently.
Exactly. These contradictory elements are in collision with each other through the course of the story; on the one hand, you watch the almost craven recklessness of this actor whose narcissism is so fearsome but it’s only because she bulldozed her way into this world that things get shaken up for Joe. You’re left really wrestling with these things in your mind.
Q. These two female characters are both so manipulative. With the scenes and plot points you choose, are you also trying to manipulate us to a certain place emotionally or trying to get us to examine our own thoughts and our own expectations?
It’s the latter. I want an internal debate as you watch this movie that wakes you up, not a movie that just satisfies your expectations going in and checks the boxes. A lot of people just want to feel secure and happy, to have things worked out in the end or have the hero slay the dragon or kill the alien. I’m more interested in how you reconcile things that maybe aren’t so clear in the film, that isn’t just handing you the sort of tied-up-with-a-ribbon version of life.
A lot of conflicts that matter can’t be tied up in the end. And that’s really where you start looking at the world or yourself and your life differently. You might feel really strong emotions and be moved in one way or another.
Q. Elizabeth is studying Gracie to play her on screen. Do you think that movie was going to be good, or do you think she would be good in a bad movie or bad in a good movie?
I don’t want to tie it up too much, but we didn’t want to create something too impressive. You want to be left with questions about its quality and questions about its style, and certainly questions about its veracity or that so-called Truth she is so brazenly claiming that she can access.
I don’t believe in these ideas of reductive truth. I’ve made films about real people or real artists questioning this idea that fixed and known and stable truth or identity is ever achievable. And this script was poking big fun at the idea of what truth is and the pretenses that circulate in the industry of storytelling.
Q. If the truth is unknowable in these stories, are you just trying to raise questions or to tell your own version of what you perceive as a truth, not the truth?
The closest we get to truth in the world of film happens in the mind and emotions of the viewer, which is not necessarily what is on the screen or what is intended by the filmmakers. You hope you’re generating something that’s alive for the viewer and they’re taking their own knowledge and expectations and what you think the movie should do and where they think the movie should go and the differences between that.
Q. Your movies often have a layer of artifice. How do you explore that artifice without the film being overcome by it? How conscious are you of the artifice versus the real human emotion and messiness underneath?
Film is all artifice and artifice is beautiful. It’s only going through accepting that this is all constructed and fake that you get to something true, something that really speaks to the human condition.
