What comes after a life of tabloid infamy?

That’s one of the many questions posed by Todd Haynes’s latest film, May December.

Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) is an actress who comes to Savannah, Georgia in order to research her next role.  We don’t learn much about Elizabeth’s career as an actress but it appears that, while it has brought her a certain amount of fame, it hasn’t exactly been full of acclaimed work.  One person mentions seeing a picture from a film that she did in which she was involved in a blood sacrifice.  (“I googled ‘naked Elizabeth Berry,'” he explains.)  Several other people mention how much they love her TV show, Norah’s Ark, in which Elizabeth plays a veterinarian.  Elizabeth’s latest film features her playing a real person, someone who was at the center of a scandal 20 years previously and who has since faded from the public view.  Elizabeth seems to believe that this role could redefine her career.

(Hey, it worked for Margot Robbie in I, Tonya.)

Elizabeth is going to play Gracie Atherton-Woo in an upcoming indie film.  Way back in 1992, the real-life Gracie (Julianne Moore) was 36 years old and married when she was caught having sex with a 13 year-old named Joe in the back of a pet store.  Joe was a classmate of Gracie’s son and Gracie was the one who was responsible for him getting hired at the pet store in the first place.  Gracie was sent to prison, where she gave birth to Joe’s daughter.  During her trial, Gracie and Joe were both tabloid mainstays.  The nation was transfixed by their affair before eventually moving on to the next scandal.  When Gracie was eventually released from prison, she married Joe.  Now, decades after appearing on the front of every trashy magazine, Gracie and Joe (Charles Melton) are still married and they now have three children.  They live in a big house in Savannah, Gracie has a career as a pastry maker, and, from the outside, they would appear to have a perfect domestic life together.

Wearily, Gracie and Joe allow Elizabeth to spend time with the family so that she can research her role.  Elizabeth interviews other people who were effected by Gracie’s actions.  Gracie’s ex-husband (D.W. Moffett) is surprisingly forgiving.  Gracie’s children are considerably less forgiving.  Georgie (Cory Michael Smith), who was Gracie’s son from her first marriage and a schoolmate of Joe’s, is bitter and describes his mother as being mentally unbalanced while, at the same time, trying to leverage his knowledge of Gracie’s past into a job on the film.  As for Gracie and Joe’s first daughter (Piper Churda), she states that she doesn’t want the film to be made.

Cracks start to appear in the perfect image that Gracie and Joe present to the world.  Gracie can be rigid and controlling while insisting that Joe was the one who initiated the encounter in the pet store.  Gracie talks about growing up with four brothers, two of whom were older and two were younger.  Gracie mentions that one of her brothers is an admiral and it’s implied that she grew up in an atmosphere where failure was not an option.  Gracie’s daughter talks about how, when she graduated, her mother gave her a scale as a graduation gift.  When someone cancels an order for a cake, Gracie takes it as a personal rejection and breaks down into tears.  Gracie is friendly towards Elizabeth but never totally lets down her guard.

As for Joe, he emerges as well-meaning but confused, someone who is still often treated like a child by bother his wife and, eventually, the woman who is studying his wife.  Whenever we see Joe with any other adults, he’s awkward as if he’s not sure how to behave.  (When he tells his elderly father that he can hardly believe that all of his children will soon be in college, the old man’s silence tells us everything that we need to know about their relationship.)  Joe is nearly forty but it’s clear that a good deal of his emotional development stopped when he was thirteen, leaving him desperate for approval.  When he catches his teenage son smoking a joint, Joe isn’t angry as much as he’s curious.  Smoking weed is one of the many things that Joe never did when he was younger.  When Joe get high, he becomes a paranoid and emotional mess as all the feelings that he’s repressed for 23 years come spilling out.  At the same time, when Gracie has a breakdown, Joe knows exactly what to say to help her through it.

Do Gracie and Joe truly love each other or is their marriage just their way of denying the reality of what happened?  Did Gracie groom Joe or, as Gracie insists, was their affair consensual?  At first, the audience’s natural tendency is to sympathize with Elizabeth and to expect her to play some sort of role in clarifying what actually happened in that pet store.  But Elizabeth soon proves herself to be a rather detached observer, a mimic who copies the emotions of others but who, even after she gets to know Gracie and Joe as human beings, still views them as just being characters in a story.  In the end, Elizabeth can’t help us understand what happened in the pet shop because, the film suggests, not even the people who were actually there understand what happened.  All Elizabeth can do, as an actress and an observer, is try to recreate what she imagines happened.

It’s a well-made film, with Haynes deftly mixing scenes of high drama with the awkward comedy of people trying to rationally discuss the irrational.  It can also be a frustrating viewing experience, if just because Haynes often does not seem to be sure what he’s trying to say about the characters or why we should even care about either Gracie or Elizabeth.  Fortunately, the film is lucky enough to have a wonderful cast.  While Moore and Melton gets the big, dramatic scene, it’s Portman who takes the audience by surprise, giving a performance that goes from being likable to being rather chilling as Elizabeth transforms herself more and more into Gracie.  For all the film’s themes about conformity, morality, and tabloid culture, it’s main message may very well be to never trust a method actor.

May December sticks with you, even if it’s not up to the level of Haynes’s Carol.  It’s a film about what happens after the infamy, with Gracie, Joe, and Elizabeth destined to be forever defined by what happened over the course of a few minutes in the backroom of a pet store.