May December

At it’s heart, May December is an exploration of the bearing our desired version of self has on our perception of reality. Moore’s Gracie is unable to cope with the assault she faced as a child so she is more comfortable marrying a child than finds foremost through Portman’s Elizabeth. Initially, it’s easy to empathize with Elizabeth; she’s a charismatic celebrity and similar to anyone going into the film with general familiarity of it’s controversial source material, she’s compelled by the moral anomaly that is the adult-minor relationship between Moore’s Gracie and Melton’s Joe. However, as Elizabeth’s curiosity devolves into fantasy and she inevitably crosses the same moral lines as Gracie, the object of her self-righteous scrutiny, the film grows into a sardonic exposé of the conflict between our subconscious desires and our conscious perception of reality. The society that chastises a relationship like Gracie and Joe’s is the same one that ravenously consumes newspaper articles and film adaptations of their life, judging from a distance while discarding any concern for privacy. To compound his focus on contradictory realities, Haynes weaves barrages of high speed camera zooms and histrionic piano throughout the film, blurring it’s identity until the film is both an artful critique of sensationalism and the type of sensationalized melodrama that it’s critiquing. This wrestle for identity continues throughout the film until Elizabeth is no different from Gracie, and the film is has become a campy true crime reenactment. In full, Haynes  has created a truly hypnotic, provocative and generational work of meta-fiction with May December and that’s definitely gonna need some rewatches.