Film / May December

"We're basically the same."

"People, they like see me as like a victim, or something. I mean, we've been together for almost twenty-four years now. Like, why would we do that if we weren't happy?"

— Joe Yoo

May December is the fifth collaboration between Todd Haynes and Julianne Moore. It premiered at Cannes in 2023, before being picked up (for North American distribution) by Netflix. It is inspired by the Letourneau/Fualaau statutory rape affair.

A manipulative method actress, Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), goes to stay with Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) and her husband Joe (Charles Melton) in Savannah, Georgia, in preparation for a movie role. Elizabeth is going to play Gracie, who was embroiled in a "sex scandal" after sleeping with Joe in the late 90s, when he was thirteen. After serving a prison sentence, Gracie then married Joe, and now has children with him. Elizabeth becomes increasingly fascinated by the strange dynamics of the Atherton-Yoo household.

The trailer is here.

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May December contains examples of:

• 20 Minutes into the Past: The film was filmed in 2022 and released in 2023; it is set in 2015.
• Abusive Parents: Gracie is not physically abusive to her children, but it's clear her passive-aggression crosses some lines, as when she commends her daughter for her "bravery" in showing her arms in a dress or when she gifted her older daughter a scale for going off to college. Despite her insistence that her childhood was idyllic, Gracie herself seemed to have a fraught time growing up, considering her own mother got her a scale for college.
• Absurdly Youthful Father: Joe was thirteen when Gracie gave birth (and he's actually the same age as Gracie's son from her previous marriage). As a result, people constantly mistake him for their older brother.
• All There in the Manual: The older script has some more details and scenes in it that are not in the finished product, like a scene between Joe and Joe Sr (his father) where Joe Sr justifies and defends his decision to not stop Joe from marrying Gracie, saying that he wanted Joe to feel free. He does show some regret for this, implying that he possibly knows how destructive it was.
• Ambiguous Situation: Georgie claims that his mother Gracie was molested by her older brothers. However, Georgie then immediately tries to use this for leverage to get a job on Elizabeth's movie, and later Gracie denies it, saying that Georgie confessed that he told Elizabeth about it. Which of them is telling the truth is up for debate.
• Animal Motifs: Butterflies, for Joe (he collects them and bonds with Elizabeth over them) — metaphorically, he begins to "find himself" and realize the depth of his situation over the course of the film.
• Brother–Sister Incest: Georgie, Gracie's son from a previous marriage, tells Elizabeth that he read his mother's diary and learned that she was molested by her older brothers when she was a child. Gracie denies this at the end, but it's ultimately ambiguous who was telling the truth.
• Butterfly of Transformation: Joe's caring for the butterflies seems to help him realize that he was groomed into being an adult while he was still a kid due to Gracie's molestation of him.
• Child by Rape: Joe and Gracie's eldest child Honor, who was conceived from Gracie's molestation of Joe when he was a child.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: Joe seems to have long stopped seeing his relationship with Gracie as anything unseemly or abusive although it's implied he knows full well that she raped him even if he can't bring himself to leave her due to their kids.
• Dawson Casting: In-Universe. The final scene, which shows Elizabeth filming the movie, reveals that the filmmakers have cast a teenager who is clearly older than 13 to play Joe.
• Double-Meaning Title: Referencing both a May–December Romance and the film's setting in May:
  Todd Haynes: ...the film’s title plays into the month of May, too, and May is the bracketed month of an inevitability around the summer. It begins with a Memorial Day celebration and ends with graduation. So all this anxiety and nerves are circulating through that month and it plays into the title as well.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Zigzagged and deconstructed. The film is not shy about showing that this Double Standard occurred in the world of the story; Joe is Conditioned to Accept Horror and Gracie seems annoyed by suggestions she did anything wrong by raping a teenager and having his children.
• Excrement Statement: Decades after the fact, Gracie still occasionally finds shit in the mail from people disgusted by her sleeping with and marrying Joe.
• Expecting Someone Taller: Gracie remarks that she expected Elizabeth to be taller when they first meet in person.
• Famed In-Story:
  • Gracie and Joe were caught up in tabloid infamy in the '90s, and the fallout still impacts their lives even as they try to pretend it doesn't.
  • Meanwhile, Elizabeth is a well-known actress, best known for her role in the fictitious TV show Norah's Ark.
• Freudian Excuse: If you believe Georgie when he says Gracie was molested by her older brothers, she has one.
• Hair-Contrast Duo: The childish Gracie has blonde hair, while the (theoretically) more mature, accomplished Elizabeth has brown hair.
• Hollywood Genetics: Joe and Gracie's kids are 75% white and 25% Korean (as it's mentioned that Joe is half-Korean), but are played by half-Asian actors. Their level of resemblance to their Asian side can happen in real life, though.
• Hollywood Thin: Reflected for absurdity when Gracie compliments her (slim) teenage daughter, Mary, on being "brave" enough to show her arms in a sleeveless dress. Mary recognizes this for the insult it is and, clearly crestfallen, goes for a dress with sleeves.
• Hunting Is Evil: Gracie molested twelve-year-old Joe, groomed him, and had children with him, still keeping him under her thumb years later. She is also shown to be a hunter, hunting meat for her, Joe, and Elizabeth's meals. She also tells Elizabeth that she went hunting with her father and brothers. Georgie tells Elizabeth near the end that Gracie was sexually abused by her brothers growing up.
• Lost in Character: Elizabeth gradually becomes more like Gracie the longer she stays in the Atherton-Yoo orbit, and it goes beyond merely speaking or dressing like: she discusses the sex appeal of the twelve-year-old actors being cast to play Joe opposite her in the movie, and eventually entices Joe into sex herself. It's left up to interpretation how much this is an organic process, or if Elizabeth is egging it on, and if so, why? To juice up her performance? To understand Gracie and/or Joe? Or simply in hopes of maturing out of her previous roles?
• Manchild:
  • Played for drama. Although Joe has matured into adulthood on the surface, he is essentially stuck in a state of arrested development: his body language is bashful and uncertain, his wife orders him around as though he were still a child, and he's utterly naive about certain things (like smoking a joint or having sex with women other than Gracie) that he never had the chance to learn in a healthy way.
  • Gracie's son Georgie from her first marriage also counts, seeing as he still dresses and acts like a teenager despite being in his mid-30s. It's lampshaded that Gracie leaving Georgie's father for Georgie's classmate did a number on him.
  • Gracie herself is quite immature, falling into intense crying jags over issues as small as her husband not showering before he comes to bed (and therefore smelling of barbecue smoke) and one of the customers for her (admittedly failing) cake business moving away. Her inability to accept (or even perhaps understand) any other narrative other than her and Joe's "love story" also points to a kind of childlike stubbornness and her lawyer says she honestly didn't understand the seriousness of her crimes and still doesn't, believing everyone would accept her and Joe's love if they saw her side of things. Her "naivety" is at least partially an act. A letter she wrote to Joe at the time proves she knew she'd face legal consequences if they were caught. If her son is correct and she was molested by her brothers, it's possible that the trauma has left her in a state of arrested development as well.
• May–December Romance: The trope gives the movie its title, though really in name only, since Joe was only a child when he was essentially molested by Gracie.
• Method Acting: Invoked in-universe. Elizabeth is a method actor, and whether her behavior towards Joe is a result of "method acting" as Gracie — and whether she's truly been Lost in Character — is one of the movie's questions.
• Mirror Character: Much of the film's drama comes from the way Elizabeth serves as one to Gracie. Although friction is evident from the moment they first meet, it becomes clear that both of them are cut from the same manipulative, exploitative cloth.
• Mundane Made Awesome: While it is a serious drama about the effects of grooming and tabloid fame, Haynes often has fun with his direction. For instance, in one scene where Gracie opens the refrigerator, the camera zooms in as an ominous musical sting plays — only for her to casually declare "I don't think we have enough hot dogs."
• Never My Fault: Gracie tells Elizabeth that twelve-year-old Joe had been with more "women" (read: girls his age) than she had been with men while she was in her thirties. She is also very good at blaming her daughters for everything.
• Noodle Incident: Gracie is nervous about meeting a celebrity like Elizabeth due to an unspecified run-in with Judge Judy.
• Obliviously Evil: Gracie seems to honestly not think she did anything all that wrong in grooming and molesting a child and treats their relationship like it's a perfectly normal one and Joe as her true love rather than her victim.
  Morris: She, uh… She didn’t think she did anything wrong. She was head over heels.
  Elizabeth: When did it sink in?
  Morris: Has it sunk in yet?
• Parents as People: As to be expected (despite Gracie's denialism), Joe was not ready to be a dad at thirteen and his talk with his son makes it clear that his kids have to actually parent him in certain areas. While he admits to worrying about messing them up, his children all genuinely love him and seem fairly well-adjusted. Considering their mother, this speaks very well of him.
• Passive-Aggressive Kombat: The interactions between Gracie and Elizabeth never tip over into outright hostility, but the passive-aggressive sniping starts the minute the two of them meet for the first time. (See Expecting Someone Taller.)
• Practically Different Generations: The youngest of Gracie's kids by her first marriage is the same age as Joe (so, early 30s), while the oldest of her kids with Joe is around 19. It's mentioned in passing that one of her grandkids from her first marriage is graduating alongside her youngest children from her second one.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: Gracie is a more realistic example. She constantly insists to everybody that she and Joe are in a happy, equal relationship, where he has the power over her, but it becomes gradually obvious that she is very manipulative and weaponizes her own immaturity.
• Roman à Clef: Gracie sleeping with the thirteen-year-old Joe, bearing his child in prison, and marriage to him in the 1990s are strongly inspired by the real life case of Mary Kay Letourneau and her rape and eventual marriage to Vili Fualaau, her sixth-grade student, from the same time period. The line "who [was] the boss, who [was] in charge", said by Gracie when Joe first tries to discuss the power imbalance of their relationship, is even taken directly from an interview with Letourneau and Fualaau.
• Rule of Symbolism: Gracie met (and molested) twelve-year-old Joe when they were working at a pet shop together. The storeroom is a notorious place for where they were caught in the act. There is a lot of emphasis placed on the various animals and their sounds, complete with a Scare Chord.
• Self-Abuse: A pivotal scene involves Elizabeth reading a letter Gracie wrote to the teenage Joe after molesting him in the '90s, in character as Gracie, while the buzz of a vibrator is audible offscreen.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Of the less common, "dark music over mundane action" variety. The score is based on the brooding, melodramatic theme music of The Go-Between, usually for the purpose of setting the mood while fairly typical suburban life plays out. The most dramatic scenes of the movie play out without music.
• Southern Gothic: The story of a "sex scandal" (child rape/molestation case) is set in Savannah, Georgia. Gracie is a Southern Belle. (This is an addition in filming, as the script sets the story in Maine.)
• Stepford Smiler:
  • Gracie appears the picture of a happy homemaker on the surface, having moved past the tabloid scandal of her past and into a happy life. In truth, she's desperately insecure and emotionally volatile.
  • Joe clearly loves his kids, and appears to love Gracie, but Elizabeth's presence and his kids' graduation rouses unresolved memories about her manipulation and abuse of him (which he has never considered as sexual abuse before). Instead, it's pretty clear that he's been desperately unhappy in a Wife Husbandry situation that has prevented him from ever truly maturing.
• Stylistic Suck: The cheesy TV-movie that was made about Gracie and Joe in the '90s and the equally cheesy movie that Elizabeth makes afterward.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: In-universe. Elizabeth is very insistent that their Film Within a Film is going to be prestigious and insightful, and that's why she is visiting the Atherton-Yoos. When the film is shown at the end, it appears no better than the "made-for-TV movie" shown earlier in the movie, questioning if Elizabeth's exploitation of the Atherton-Yoos — Joe especially — was worthwhile.
• Too Much Information: When Elizabeth holds an acting masterclass at the local high school, one of the students asks her about sex scenes - to which she responds by giving a remarkably thorough answer that, while not sexually explicit, is much more intimate than she probably should be with high school students.
• Trashy True Crime: There's a montage of different media (magazines and at least one made-for-TV movie) shown about Gracie's molestation of Joe, her pregnancy, and her imprisonment. They are all shown to be trashy in a stereotypically 1990s way. Elizabeth's movie is shown to be equally low-budget and exploitative.
• Wag the Director: In-universe. Elizabeth stays much longer in Savannah than budgeted for and, in the final scene, insists on more takes than necessary for her seduction scene with the actor playing Joe. She is able to do this, because she had an affair with the director, so she has leverage over him. And given the apparent "made-for-TV" budget of her film, she likely used her leverage to finance her trip to Savannah in the first place.