May December (2023)

Todd Haynes has spent three decades building a cinema of surfaces that bite, and May December finds him in Savannah, staging a tabloid scandal as a hall of mirrors. Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth, a television actress who arrives to study the life of Gracie, played by Julianne Moore, a woman who began a relationship with a thirteen-year-old boy and later married him. The film withholds the moral clarity that cable news would supply. It hands us camp, melodrama, and a piano score borrowed from The Go-Between, then dares us to enjoy it.

The social consciousness on display is deliberately muted. The Yoo family is Korean-American, and Charles Melton's casting lends the film a quiet representational texture, though the screenplay never examines what that identity means. Race sits in the frame and stays there. The gendered machinery of the story, a woman as predator and a boy as property, is handled with real rigor, but Haynes declines to convert it into an argument. He is allergic to the sermon. The entertainment industry takes its lumps: Elizabeth's method is vampiric, a woman feeding on a family's wreckage to build a performance, and the film regards that appetite with cold amusement. This is a critique of show business, not of capital. The monarch butterflies in Joe's garage are a metaphor for a stalled life, not a plea for the planet.

Instead of a message, we get a mood. Haynes holds the whole sordid business in suspended judgment, and the effect is a film that trusts its audience to sit in discomfort without a narrator arriving to explain the lesson. The result is slippery, humane, and resistant to any program. A serious work about a monstrous situation that refuses to tell anyone how to feel. For that refusal alone it deserves the acclaim it collected, and it earns a place among the year's most unnerving character studies.