Elizabeth is a successful actress who temporarily moves into the home of Gracie Atherton-Yoo, the woman she is to play in a biopic. Years earlier, Gracie had found herself at the center of a scandal that all the mass media had talked about: an exemplary wife and mother in a small town in the southern United States, at the age of 36 she had started an extramarital affair with Joe Yoo, a thirteen-year-old of Korean origin . The affair had come out in the open and Gracie had left her husband and son to live out her affair with Joe, defying the disapproval of her ex-husband and her son, as well as the Savannah community. Joe and Gracie had married, had three children, and continued to live in their small town proclaiming their true love. However, Elizabeth’s arrival will act as a litmus test of all the problems removed by Grace, who sports a constant smile and an inexhaustible ability to appear unscathed by that scandal.
The story of May December is the inspiration for director and screenwriter Todd Haynes, who maintains a particular affinity with the “king of melodrama” Douglas Sirk, with whom he shares the determination to explore the universe of social prohibition: the homosexuality of Far from Heaven, that of Carol and Therese in Carol, and now the relationship between a woman and a little boy.
But this time the director digs deeper into the complex psychology of Gracie, who gradually manifests an increasingly disturbing inability to grasp the anomaly of her situation, and to realize that her feeling for Joe has bordered on the dangerous terrain of manipulation .
In the present, Gracie rules Joe around, with the intent of giving the world a portrait of perfect normality according to the codes of the good bourgeoisie: woe to admit that she and her young husband are a less than successful couple, woe to take into account that perhaps Joe’s younger age at the time of the beginning of their relationship may have been characterized by an imbalance of awareness (“May-December” is a way of indicating a relationship in which the age difference is so great that the members of the couple represent very distant months within the year).
Elizabeth enters these quicksands with a straight leg, wallowing in it like a duck, because in terms of moral ambiguity she is second to none, and immediately presents herself as a double of Gracie, also thanks to the physical resemblance between the two actresses who play the roles of the two women, Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman. Their game is that of cat and mouse but also that of mutual seduction, and Joe cannot help but enter into this erotic tension.
Moore is masterful in giving the audience many small clues to Gracie’s perceptive distortion, from a childish “zeppola” that comes and goes to a nervous gesture that reveals a compulsion to control (especially of oneself): but Moore and Haynes are very careful to don’t make her a monster, siding with that common feeling that would like to label her as such.
For the third time after Safe and Far from Paradise Moore confirms herself as the ideal muse for Haynes, ready to embody the fragility and contradictions of the human soul, and fearless in underlining its unpleasantness.