Critical Corns: “May December”
Julianne Less returns!
Still Alice – oh, if only she won for playing a bottled-water tycoon, not a bog standard ‘Bette-Davis-goes-blind’ vehicle – was nine years ago. To my mind, an afterglow nomination consolidates a dubious win. Remember Sandra Bullock magnificently following The Blind Side with Gravity? Ms. Less hasn’t even mustered a Musical/Comedy Globe citation in the last decade – although I imagine she came close for Gloria Bell, a quasi-success in her string of misfires. Of the recent Best Actress champions, no one has a spottier post-Oscar career. Not uncommon after an “overdue” win. Susan Saranwrap, Depressica Lange and Shirley MacLaine are casualties of the Academy’s tendency to be besotted with a certain performer until the date of conferral; after which they’re never included again! Despite doing the best work an ageist industry affords them. I wish I could take such a lofty view when it comes to Julianne. Truth is: I’ve never been an admirer.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I always feel she just stands there in her pictures. Helen Keller can see the wheels turning. Even the ones you lot regard as holy texts. For me, she isn’t even third-best of the women in The Hours. And Far From Heaven makes me want to seek out the real thing: Douglas Sirk’s fifties melodramas which inspired it. Julianne’s most beloved triumphs have been with Todd Haynes. She is the Nicole Kidperson to his Baz Lurpak. All four of whom have “new” content on streaming. The antipodeans present Faraway Downs, a director’s cut of Australia, on Hulu. I dare say the Less-Haynes offering, Netflix’s May December*, is also a rehash.
It may sound counterintuitive, but Mildred Pierce with Kate Winslet is about the most original thing Mr. Haynes ever did. A project that was memorably filmed, winning another actress her Oscar, before! To circumvent the Production Code, the 1945 movie added a murder plot. Haynes, on the other hand, approached the Depression-era potboiler with extreme fidelity. Every sentence of James M. Cain’s novel is dramatised over five-and-a-half hours – in the manner of Branagh’s Hamlet. For a queer director, famed for a back catalogue that includes Safe and Velvet Goldmine, it’s a highly straight take. And all the better for it! I would also include Carol in this elite group. A literate adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt with the faintest whiff of Brief Encounter.
Camp isn’t easy. That seems to be May December’s selling point. It’s certainly not its abysmal title. They should’ve called it The Actress, which conjures up the theatrical and highly feminised world of Haynes’s métier. Loosely inspired by the Mary Kay Letourneau case, the film concerns a 36-year-old housewife’s impregnation by a schoolboy 23 years her junior. Two decades on, we find “Gracie” (Julianne celebrates her 63rd birthday today, which, as she pointed out in her 2015 Best Actress speech, really makes her 58) in a state of perilous Yentl health. Meanwhile, her paramour (Riverdale’s Charles Melton), whom she wed after facing the full brunt of the law, is still young enough to start over. It depicts a time when the children of this seedy liaison have come of age, and a television starlet, Elizabeth Berry, is preparing to play the older woman in a film.
You’d think to counter Julianne’s high-toned technicality, Haynes would’ve cast an earthier presence as the ingénue – but he’s used Natalie Portman, another ice queen. Julianne and Natalie are surely great scholars; I can only imagine the lengths they go to in their preparation. (I mean, for her role as a dementia patient in Alice, Julianne went so method that she couldn’t remember her own husband or children... Or why she said ‘Yes’ to Dear Evan Hansen. No.) But neither of them approach the “artifice, sylisation, theatricalisation, irony, playfulness, and exaggeration” that is essential to camp, per Susan Sontag’s famous essay. Their mannered performances go down like ninepins! The only thing you’ll remember from May December, I fear, is Julianne’s daft accent. Think Tharah Paulthon doing Drew Barrymore doing Truman Capote.
“Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticised – or at least, apolitical,” Sontag wrote. Haynes and the film’s writer Samy Burch shoehorn in contemporary talking points, but stop short of pushing buttons. Couched in psychobabble, the result is second-tier Michael Haneke: Caché or Funny Games for people whose pronouns are “he/they”. It simply doesn’t work as satire! (But nor does it have the economy and detachment that, say, Richard Eyre brought to Notes on a Scandal, an airtight thriller of ninety minutes.) As I’m fond of saying, the only thing distinguishing Mommie Dearest from a biopic that would win an armload of awards is shaving five seconds off the scene transitions. Those long pauses bring the comedy. Camp isn’t intentional, yet today’s film beats you over the head with it! It leaves one longing for the masterpieces that Haynes plagiarises (he even uses Michel Legrand’s score for 1971’s The Go-Between lock-stock-and-barrel): All About Eve, Persona and any number of Almodóvars.
Charles Melton is getting the lion’s share of praise. In the past week, he has swept critics’ prizes as Best Supporting Actor. I initially thought: “Well, he is a year or two older than us; we have no reason to grudge his triumph”. Until I realised he was playing a character, like Natalie’s Elizabeth, in his mid-thirties. Portman is forty-two – the same age Bette Davis was as Margo Channing, but she’s in the Anne Baxter part. The generation gap between her and Less doesn’t register; but she also fails to read as Melton’s contemporary. This missing element, so important to the script, would’ve been striking if the film had Kidperson and Margot Robbie in the leads.
By inviting his muse back for the fifth time, Julianne is doing her Greatest Hits routine. Portman, admittedly, makes the most of a thin role. (After all, her best turns have involved her playing a bad performer.) As I wrote about Jodie Foster in Nyad: in a film with an identity crisis, of course we’re drawn to the cookie-cutter character. And Charles Melton’s pivotal scene might well have been written by ChatGPT!
It’s an entertaining affair, but finds its director and its leads on autopilot. (Julianne) Lesser work all round.
*I’m Caught Out. Though on Netflix stateside, May December will be released as a Sky Cinema Exclusive in my neck of the woods on the 8th of December.
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I wish they had leaned hard into camp, or at least done a dark comedy.