May December (2023)

Jack and I liked this cringey story of a woman raising a family with the man she raped when he was in middle school and the actress shadowing her to prepare for playing her in a movie. With terrific performances by the three leads, many uncomfortable laughs, and an occasionally overwrought score, it is a critic's darling, with 30 wins and 136 other nominations as of today.

 

Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman are wonderful in the roles of the housewife Gracie and the actress Elizabeth, and Charles Melton is no slouch as the husband Joe. All of his 18 wins and all but one of his 39 nominations are for that role.

Todd Haynes directs from a screenplay by Samy Burch with the story by her and Alex Mechanik. Apparently Portman first brought the script to Haynes, and all of her fourteen nominations for this movie are for the leading role, while Moore is nominated (28 times, plus one win) for supporting.

It's loosely based on the 1990s tabloid headlines of Mary Kay Letourneau, a Seattle teacher who had an affair with student Vili Fualaau, and had his child when he was 13 and she was 35. Here's a thorough description of the actual Letourneau case. Like Letourneau, Gracie went to jail, and she and Joe married as soon as possible to raise their children together. Gracie and Joe are shown to be a boring suburban couple who barely acknowledge their horrifying past, and the laughs often come from the incongruity of the two.

The soundtrack, available on Apple Music and elsewhere, combines original tracks by Marcelo Zarvos with tunes by Michel Legrand written for The Go Between (1971), and its intensity belying the mundane action on screen is one thing that had us and many audiences laughing.

Portman was last blogged for narrating Dolphin Reef and for acting in Annihilation, Moore for Suburbicon, Haynes for Wonderstruck, Zarvos for The Best of Enemies, and Legrand for The Guardians. Melton is new to me and this is the feature debut for Burch and Mechanik.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics' and audiences' gap of averages 90 and 68% mirror the 22 age gap between the characters. It's definitely worth seeing. We streamed it on Netflix on December 12.