May December (now streaming on Netflix) finds director Todd Haynes returning to the succulent melodrama of his best films, Carol and Far From Heaven. The latter stars Julianne Moore, who co-anchors May December – alongside Natalie Portman, making one hell of an on-screen pair – and has now worked with Haynes five times. Here, Moore plays a woman loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, the subject of a lascivious tabloid scandal in the late 1990s, when she spent time in prison on statutory rape charges after having a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old boy, giving birth to his children, and marrying him after her release. Moore is perfect for this role, and Haynes is perfect for this type of material, and Portman is the perfect catalyst for this intriguing character study. 

The Gist: It begins awkwardly, and knowing the situation, we shouldn’t be surprised that it does. Elizabeth (Portman) rings the doorbell and waits, and waits, and waits. She hears people in the backyard, picks up a package left on the doorstep and heads around the house. A backyard barbecue is in full swing – family, friends, neighbors, children playing, hot dogs on the grill. Lots of hot dogs. Elizabeth is finally greeted by Gracie (Moore), who’s almost certainly throwing this shindig not necessarily for Elizabeth, but to show how this family is functional and “normal” and a part of a loving community. Gracie and Joe (Charles Melton) live here. She’s a couple decades his senior, he’s 36, and they have a daughter in college and twins who are about to graduate high school, and suddenly we’re using basic math and, well, reacting to the sum. 

Notably, Elizabeth isn’t just Elizabeth, but Elizabeth Berry, a famous actress who’s going to play Gracie in a movie. Elizabeth will spend time with Gracie in search of something “real” and something more complex than tabloid headlines; Gracie hopes their meeting results in a gracious, sympathetic characterization. Back to the BBQ: Remember that package? Elizabeth hands it to Gracie, who suspects and confirms that it’s a box full of feces. She and Joe shrug it off. This happens often. But in this case, is it an omen? The first action of an actress who’s going to play – to use a bit of gross reductionism – a complicated woman is to hand her a box full of shit. Like I said, it begins awkwardly.

It doesn’t really get much better. Oh, Gracie and Elizabeth are kind to each other as they eat dinner with Gracie’s family – fresh quail she hunted herself – and attend flower-arrangement classes and shop for Gracie’s daughter Mary’s (Elizabeth Yu) graduation dress. You know, Normal People Things. Elizabeth does more research, interviewing the ex-husband who divorced Gracie after the scandal, running into Gracie’s piece-of-work adult son Georgie (Cory Michael Smith) and visiting the pet shop where Gracie and young Joe had sex in the stockroom – or, if you’re less charitable and therefore more honest, where Gracie raped a seventh grader. I like to think Elizabeth feels the Werner Herzogian notion of “the voodoo of location” when she sits in the stockroom corner and gets into character by simulating sexual intercourse, all alone, by herself. OK! Who is Elizabeth, really? We’re kind of not sure, beyond being the star of something popular (and almost certainly cheesy) called Nora’s Ark. Well, she’s also 36, just like Joe. She’ll spend time with him too, visiting him at work, where he’s an X-ray tech, and they’re in a dim-lit room looking at a projection of a fractured wrist, and is that sexual tension in the air? Oh man. Jeez. Oh no. Jeez. Man. Jeez. Jeez.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The murmurings you’ve heard about parallels to Bergman’s Persona are spot-on.

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Performance Worth Watching: Moore and Portman are at full power here. Full power. But don’t sleep on Melton, the Riverdale star who becomes the emotional heart of May December, grounding its understated lasciviousness with perfectly modulated notes of quietly tortured sincerity. 

Memorable Dialogue: A highly dramatic soap-opera zoom-in on Gracie as she opens the refrigerator and says: “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs.”

Sex and Skin: One somewhat graphic sex scene.

Our Take: The most vital moment in May December is when Elizabeth, in a classic Method acting move, watches as Gracie applies her makeup. They look at each other, and look in the mirror, and look at each other in the mirror, and look at themselves in the mirror, and Gracie puts makeup on her own face, and then puts makeup on Elizabeth’s face. What’s happening here? On one level, Elizabeth is attempting to understand how a woman who once shattered a moral taboo can live her life without any readily apparent shame or guilt, how this woman “puts on her face” and encounters the outside world, which would seem to be far more challenging for her than for someone who doesn’t face the potential for side-eyed scorn on any given day. 

And as they sort of become one person – Gracie is an “actor” playing the part of someone who should be an accepted and well-adjusted member of society, and Elizabeth is seeking to “become” Gracie for the sake of some grand and potentially unreachable artistic goal – the film folds in on itself, and becomes a sly and subtle satirical commentary of filmed biographies. They always tend to be tributes to high-profile figures who achieved something extraordinary. But what does a fictionalized version of a story like this have to say about the human condition? Anything of substance? Or is it just exploitation wrapped in a veneer of prestige? 

That’s just one layer of a film that’s all about thematic ambiguity and tonal sleight-of-hand. It’s absurd and crepuscular in its near-camp comedy, and piercing in its portrayal of emotional fallout, specifically Joe and Georgie, who you won’t be surprised to learn haven’t emerged unscathed from all… this. This – this thing that hangs in the atmosphere at all times like invisible pollution, tormenting Elizabeth’s asthma as she searches for clarity and only ends up creating more putrescent fog. Haynes is a master of winking provocation, and you can almost hear him giggling with delight as he directs Moore and Portman to find pseudo-cordial, deeply chilly and profoundly awkward air to share as each character tries to suss out the other’s intentions. They’re hypnotizing to watch, and Haynes, as he did with the similarly layered and eyebrow-raising Carol, immerses us fully into their unsettling ethical milieu. He’s the Michelangelo of modern melodrama, reshaping and refining it into something fresh, heady and intoxicating.

Our Call: One viewing of May December does it no justice. STREAM IT and then STREAM IT again. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.