'May December' Is One of the Best True Crime Movies Ever

By Alison Lanier | Film | December 6, 2023 |

By Alison Lanier | Film | December 6, 2023 |

Todd Haynes’ newest foray, May December, starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, is one of my favorite movies of the year, hands down. (Not least because Portman hasn’t gotten to stretch her formidable acting skills in a truly despicable role like this in a good long while.) But the movie is also fascinating for another reason: it’s a ripped-from-the-headlines, true crime story fictionalized by A-listers.

Now we’ve seen no shortage of true crime adaptations lately, usually spinning off of their docuseries counterparts. Think of The Staircase, The Dropout, or WeCrashed, all with star-studded casts, that appeared almost reflectively following their corresponding trending true crime stories, related first in documentaries and podcasts.

But May December is in its own league, and it puts to shame the cut-and-dried formula of fictionalized true crime. It’s premised around Elizabeth (Portman) or “the actress” as Gracie (Moore) calls her, traveling to embed herself in the home and life of Gracie’s family. Elizabeth is going to play Gracie in a Hollywood retelling of Gracie’s controversial tabloid romance with Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), her now husband and father of a handful of children. The snag here is that Gracie got romantically and sexually involved with Joe when she was in her mid-thirties and when Joe was thirteen years old. Yeah.

The movie itself is a loose Hollywood retelling of the infamous case of Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau, who in 1997 were caught having an “affair” when she was thirty-four and he was twelve. Haynes makes small adjustments—Gracie is thirty-six and Joe thirteen in May December’s rendition, and rather than teacher and student, they’re a shop manager and employee, respectively. Both Gracie and Letourneau went to prison for rape, and both reunited with their underage paramour when they were released and raised children of their own together.

But the brilliance of May December’s approach to the true crime story is its exploration of storytelling itself—and the implicit violence that comes with turning very real and very damaged peoples’ lives into stories.

Gracie and Joe are living a picture-perfect life, convinced of their love for one another and that the world simply doesn’t understand them and their relationship. Despite the occasional box of literal shit left on their front porch, they live in their beautiful house in the same community that their scandal shook years before.

Layers of silence wrap around the couple. Moore portrays Gracie as a proud but fragile woman, steely in her sense of herself but prone to hairpin-trigger meltdowns. The viewer knows what she’s done is horrific; does she know that, even if she won’t admit it to herself? Joe is wrapped in layers of silence, marching on into his role as husband and father at a criminally young age. He’s devoted and apparently content, but his sense of wellbeing is revealed to be deeply reliant on a lack of self-examination and a willingness not to ask questions.

Elizabeth arrives, courteous and self-composed, a famous Hollywood actress gracing this small-town family with her presence. But Elizabeth, who is also our primary POV character, is beautiful, insincere, manipulative, and laser-focused on getting what she wants. And what she wants is access, to understand Gracie and then subsume her, capturing who this frightened and fanciful rapist is…or who Elizabeth wants her to be. To do that, Elizabeth tears down the last shreds of privacy, the most intimate barriers, in Gracie and Joe’s life. She’s chasing a story that she can bottle and then control—and in the process she enacts disturbing, intimate violence of her own.

Elizabeth forces Gracie and Joe to face themselves in a way that is devastatingly disruptive to the peace the couple had found in their own experience of their “story.”

This feels so reminiscent of what true crime itself does as a genre—the invasive and exploitative telling and retelling of a horrific story, turning it from the experience of the people who lived it to narrativized and marketable media.

There are heavy nods to Persona in this movie, as Elizabeth deliberately and mercilessly reflects Gracie back at herself both visually and psychologically. She wears Gracie’s distinctive lipstick and does her makeup exactly the same way as Gracie, while mastering an echo of Gracie’s physical bearing and her facial expressions and while sitting in on family dinners and life-event celebrations.

In this movie, people regard themselves and others frequently in mirrors in a Persona-esque act of reflection and self-reflection, acting straight into the camera. Many conversations or monologues are conducted while making eye contact with other characters through the warping angles of a mirror…or making eye contact directly with the viewer while implicitly also watching themselves in the glass.

At the same time, we watch Elizabeth understanding Gracie on a deeper and more insidious level, realizing the kind of imbalance of power and emotional manipulation on which Gracie has built her life.

But—and this is a light spoiler—we’re left with the quiet question still unresolved: whose hands is the story actually in?

I watch a lot of true crime. I’ve read many, many explorations and theories about why true crime is so compelling, so strangely popular as it delivers horror story after horror story. May December is my favorite kind of exploration in this vein—a thoroughly “human story” (a term that Elizabeth somewhat ironically repeats as a defensive catchphrase throughout the movie) that asks the questions that true crime begs, without pretending to know the answers. Also in this category are the rare true crime entries like Landscapers, the HBO miniseries starring David Thewlis and Olivia Coleman, which dramatizes the act of storytelling itself, with the fourth wall thoroughly shattered.

I thoroughly recommend May December for those with a bent for true crime and good films—or just a bent for good films.

The movie is now streaming on Netflix.