by Nick Taylor
I don't think Julianne Moore has enough awards
Another year, another Todd Haynes film in grave danger of being overlooked by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I don’t love May December as deeply as some of y’all, but its complete omission from SAG was a gigantic bummer. With Oscar voting underway, I’ve decided to do what I do best: write about actresses for a moderate and appreciative corner of queers on the internet. I’m bringing back my Supporting Actress write-ups as an For Your Consideration pulpit, starting with my absolute favorite of the performances currently contending for a nomination: Julianne Moore’s black hole of pathetic neediness and weaponized ignorance in May December.
Some have alleged Moore’s Gracie Atherton-Yoo, the statutory rapist-cum-suburban housewife, is a leading role strategically placed in the supporting category to maximize May December’s awards potential. Because I am writing about folks contending for this award, I will not be interrogating Moore’s placement in this article, though I believe she belongs in the supporting category and am welcome to discussing it further for a large sum of money.
Does anyone really know Gracie Atherton-Yoo? This question is one of May December’s defining thru-lines, with just about everyone we meet offering some insight or explanation of how she ended up with the life she has. When the film starts, Gracie is happily married to her second husband Joe (Melton) in Savannah, Georgia. 23 years earlier, when Gracie was 36 and Joe was 13, Gracie was caught having sex with Joe in the supply closet of the pet shop they worked at, turning them into tabloid fodder for the rest of their lives. Gracie soon divorced her first husband and had her and Joe’s first child in jail. Back in the present year of 2015, Gracie and Joe are beloved figures in their community, devoted parents of three kids contemplating life as empty-nesters as their twins (Elizabeth Yu and Gabriel Chung) gear up to graduate high school.
The arrival of actress Elizabeth Berry (Portman) upends the life they’ve built for themselves. Elizabeth is set to play Gracie in an upcoming indie film, and has come to interview the happy couple about how they met, the circumstances in their lives that brought them together, and what they think of themselves now. Elizabeth conducts her research vampirically. She steals Gracie’s lisp and style and body language. She re-enacts Gracie’s seduction of Joe, stealing away private moments at his work and teasing his interest, helping him realize his own stuntedness purely as fodder to gain his trust and arouse his attraction. Elizabeth picks and pries at the couple’s defenses, enjoying their hospitality at summer barbecues and family parties and goading them with questions they’d prefer to leave alone.
Gracie, for her part, is quite the hostess, even as she can’t help but keep her guard up or throw a spiky rejoinder at her guest. Writing and directing are invaluable to these scenes, particularly the decision to block both women in the frame, their faces and bodies simultaneously present for the audience. Moore nails these mundane pas-a-deuxes of Gracie and Elizabeth studying each other while trying to keep their cards hidden. Moore keys perfectly into the script’s dark comedy, inhabiting a woman lying to herself about every aspect of her own life without going for Portman’s more performative cadences. She’s trying to sell her and Joe’s story as one of unconventional true love triumphing over the cruel, reductive judgments of others, an act she’s been putting on for herself every day of her life. Gracie’s delusions are so familiar she’s able to wear them like an old sweater, even as guilt and self-knowledge threaten to bubble over when provoked.
It’s hysterical to watch Moore change moods on a dime based on whether or not Gracie approves of the questions Elizabeth is asking. She throws the line “What does that have to do with the movie?” without raising her voice, but she turns to Elizabeth with such steeliness in her eyes, her posture accommodating the faux-casual but utterly venomous rebuttal, that the actress briefly stalls and reboots under her gaze. When interacting with neighbors, Moore sells Gracie as a well-liked and active member of her community. She knows how to bake a delicious pie and arrange her flowers just so. Teaching Elizabeth is its own exercise in patience, with Moore’s line readings and sidelong glances indicating exactly what she thinks of this bitch’s domestic skills. Sure, Gracie raped and wed a literal child, but she at least knows how to spread fruit filling inside a pie crust like a respectable human being.
“Hysterical” may ultimately be the wrong word for Gracie, given how lacerating her laugh lines often are, but not for Moore's performance. What else can we do but balk in disbelief at how sunny she is when she commends her daughter for defying traditional beauty standards by wearing a sleeveless gown to her graduation ceremony? Moore lets the audacity of the line speak for itself rather than underlining malice or maternal jealousy, allowing the audience enough room to wonder what the hell would make her say that. Another instance of maternal toxicity rears its head at a family dinner the night before graduation, where her oldest daughter Honor (Piper Curda) asks what inspired Gracie to give her a scale as her going-away present for college. “My mother did the same for me” she says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and as if this in itself was okay. “I want all my children to grow up healthy and strong” she says, offended to be interrogated about anything she’s ever done, particularly by her own children. It’s not like she’s ever done anything wrong to the people she says she cares about, right?
Any sense of loss erupts violently and totally from Gracie, the kind of full-body release that only makes sense as a cumulative response to everything that has ever gone wrong in a person’s life. Gracie’s full-bodied sobs at losing a client for her baking business are frightening and pathetically dramatic, but I’m also reminded of a very early tantrum, as she chokes out tears from the smell of charcoal and smoke emanating off Joe after a barbecue. “I wish you’d showered before you got into bed”, “I wasted HOURS on this cake”, etc. Yes, Moore does a fantastic job of illustrating how painful it must be to manage this woman’s fragility, but if she’s this distraught at losing hours, at losing minutes, what does she think of her life before she met Joe? What does she think of her first marriage, of her childhood, of the life she has now when she feels the slightest twinge of regret? There’s such an ugly emptiness at the center of this woman, emblematized by a desperate need to control how the world sees her.
I’ve read a few reviews questioning the decision to make Gracie such an enigma when the history of her real-life counterpart is so well-documented. Yet Moore makes the absolute most of this artistic decision, refusing to "explain" Gracie while finding some very human truths inn her. Because even if the different stories and explanations offered by herself and the other characters are true, is there a trauma that would make sense of Gracie’s choices? What mix of abuse, of real or practiced naivety, of lifelong discontent and manipulative behavior could help us understand something as grotesque as pedophilia, let alone the more quotidian behaviors of a devoted homemaker who doesn't always see eye to eye with her brood?
The gag of it all, finally, is that Moore’s Gracie is defined as much by this fragility as how brilliantly she’s weaponized her naivety into an armor against all forms of self-knowledge or coerced admission. Gracie's lisp, among the best character details of any performance this year, changes in intensity depending on whether she wants to come across as a simple woman who didn’t know better or an autonomous adult, even as Moore balances these fluctuations with some other faux-casual calculation in her body language or line readings. She’s a very secure person after all. Better than anyone else in May December, Moore encapsulates the hideous gray zone of unseen depths and the plain truth that, actually, what you see is pretty much what you’re gonna get. Gracie is a wife and mother with the kinds of family joys and troubles you might expect from any woman. She is also a rapist who preyed on a child, paid her dues under the law, married him, and is living in this new life she made for herself. She likes to bake. What else is there to say?
May December is currently streaming exclusively on Netflix