Is ‘May December’ a Comedy?
Every few years, the Golden Globe awards have a category hiccup. In 2015, the Ridley Scott/Matt Damon Robinson-Crusoe-in-space sci-fi movie “The Martian” was nominated (and won) for best motion picture — musical or comedy, even though the movie contained no songs and no one thought it was a comedy. A month ago, in that same category, the Globes gave a nomination to “May December,” Todd Haynes’ acclaimed but hard-to-categorize film based, not so loosely, on the true story of Mary Kay Letourneau. She, of course, was the sixth-grade teacher who spent seven years in prison after having been caught in a sexual relationship with one of her 12-year-old students, who she went on to marry and have a family with.
Categorizing “May December” as a “musical or comedy” is a lot more eyebrow-raising than calling “The Martian” one. In this case, though, the Globes at least have an ally: all the chatter on social media that has debated whether or not Haynes’ film is a piece of intentional camp. (Most critics, even those who love the film, seem to think that it is.) In addition, the nomination sparked a bit of a firestorm when outraged commenters asked how a movie that hinges on an adult’s predatory behavior — indeed, her statutory rape of a child (in the movie he’s 13) — could possibly be labeled a comedy.
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In a way, I agree with the protesters. I don’t think “May December” is a comedy. I don’t even think it’s camp, though the film is staged, at moments, with an overripe melodramatic extravagance that has been a hallmark of Todd Haynes’ cinematic voice. Yet Haynes is often a misunderstood director. “Far from Heaven,” his 2002 masterpiece, re-created the world of a 1950s Douglas Sirk soap opera with such dark-shadowed obsessiveness that the miracle of the movie was how sincere it was. It wasn’t a kitsch parody — it was a time machine.
“May December” has elements that Twitter/X hipsters can chortle at with a kind of above-it-all/in-on-the-joke wide-eyed snide knowingness: the tawdriness of the film’s tabloid pedigree, or the way that it reconfigures Michel Legrand’s purplishly dread-soaked musical score from the 1971 film “The Go-Between.” Yet the lure of Haynes’ film turns out to be how much he means it. Instead of asking us to smirk with ironic glee at his fictionalized gloss on the Letourneau saga, he actually wants us to dive into its danger.
Gracie (Julianne Moore), the film’s Letourneau character, lives in a large house in Savannah and thinks of herself as a “normal” wife and mother who is still very much in love with her husband and former child lover, Joe (Charles Melton). The two have twins, a son and a daughter, who are about to graduate from high school. Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), the famous actress who’s preparing to star in an independent film based on Gracie’s story, is the inquiring mind who wants to know. She has come to Savannah to connect with the woman she’s playing, and as she unpacks Gracie, layer by layer, the movie turns into a detective story. The mystery that Elizabeth is trying to solve — for herself, and for the audience — is: What was going on in Gracie, all those years ago, to make her do what she did?
Gracie, as conceived by the screenwriter Samy Burch, is a quintessential Todd Haynes heroine. On the surface, she’s a paragon of middle-class conventionality, but the movie presents her original sin (the “seduction” of Joe) as a dark sick secret protest against the role that society has handed her. It’s akin to how Haynes’ Barbie-doll classic “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” treated Carpenter’s anorexia, or to the Moore character’s environmental/psychosomatic illness in Haynes’ “Safe,” or to the Dennis Quaid character’s turbulent queerness as viewed by the homophobic society of “Far from Heaven.”
Elizabeth, the audience’s stand-in, is out to explore a forbidden question: Could a relationship that the world characterizes, quite rightly, as one of predation and abuse possibly be, as well, a relationship powered by love? The film’s answer is to present that very question as a resounding mystery, one that dances between the tawdry and the taboo. Viewed in that light, the categorization of “May December” as either comedy or camp is a way of not quite looking the movie in the face, of detaching oneself from the experience, of shrugging off its danger with a laugh.
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