On May December

Can we do it again, please? It's getting more real

Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore in May December (2023)

In Todd Haynes’ recent film May December, a well-known actress arrives at a family home to research for an upcoming role. The actress, Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) will be playing a woman convicted and jailed for the sexual relationship she conducted with a seventh-grader; she was 36 and he was 13. That was more than two decades ago, though, and the couple — Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton) — are married and live together in a large, light-filled house in Georgia. She makes cakes on commission, he raises butterflies; they’re about to send their youngest daughter to college; they seem well-liked in their community. Elizabeth arrives in sunglasses and hands them a decorated box she found on their porch. The box is full of dogshit.

Like Elizabeth’s film-within-a-film, May December was inspired by a true story: that of Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau, whose relationship trajectory maps pretty closely onto Gracie and Joe’s. As the film progresses, the lasting consequences of the affair and the tabloid scandal it instantiated become more and more clear. The narrative explores the tensions between the three leads for the duration of Elizabeth’s trip; she outstays her welcome, pulling on loose threads and beginning a process of unravelling.

Long after I saw the film I kept thinking about Elizabeth, her ambition and her methods. As someone also working from life, they were uncomfortably familiar to me. I make people’s portraits for a living, and in order that my pictures might capture something authentic, I strive for as much intimacy as I can. Elizabeth is a deeply unsympathetic character, but May December raises questions for anyone working with real lives and stories: actors, filmmakers, journalists, documentarians. What ethical responsibility do we have towards people we believe to be unethical? Does good art excuse exploitation? Does fictionalising a story mean that the usual rules no longer apply? Is it better to engage disingenuously, or not to engage at all?

Definitely not an endorsement of Anna K’s views more broadly, but this tweet made me laugh

Elizabeth is clearly well-practised at ingratiating herself. She adopts a persona of warm, grateful humility — Gracie is so generous to welcome her, she wants Gracie to feel seen and known. She endlessly simpers and compliments the extended group of people she meets with for interviews. She explains to a neighbour that she’s drawn to the story because it’s complex and human. This is a vocabulary of euphemism. There’s no judgement, her careful idiom suggests; she’s trying to understand deeply, so that she can perform the role of Gracie with the requisite nuance.

Of course it’s all performance. As the film develops, she becomes more and more ruthless, careless with her subjects’ feelings, making her tactics of ingratiation seem even more hollow and manipulative. But however warped her ethics, we understand her manipulations as means to a high-minded end: her art. We have reason to take her seriously as an actor. She’s dedicated (endlessly taking notes on her yellow notepad, pushing her director for more research budget, poring over old tabloid reports in her hotel room, rehearsing Gracie’s faces in the mirror); she’s thorough (spending extensive time with the family, with those connected to the family, visiting the relevant locations, always asking for that little bit more — the extra access it’s awkward to ask for, the bit that feels like a risk). She’s obsessive about the role, and her investment in it seems like one of the only sincere things about her; she emphasises to both her subjects and her director that she’s trying to get to something “true”.

The kicker, at the end of May December, is that Elizabeth’s film is bad. The final scene opens on a set, the directors and producers crowded around monitors and facing towards the shot. We wonder what we’re going to see; and then there’s Elizabeth, in a twee pink dress, next to a badly cast boy, lisping terribly. After three takes the director says they’ve got it, and Elizabeth leaps to her feet, intent, pleading. “Wait, can we do it again please? Please? Just for me? It’s getting more real.” She’s urgent and committed; this is what all her scheming and manipulating was for; and yet it’s amounted to something totally janky. The cost to Joe and Gracie, both separately and together, has been huge — and for what?

I fear this possibility, or a version of it, in my own working life. When I turn up with my cameras, and my subject gives me their time, welcomes me into their home, engages with me in good faith — trusts me in this vulnerable moment of revealing themselves in front of the camera — what happens if the pictures are no good? Or simply unflattering? And should my photographs always flatter, or should the priority be “truth”? When the circumstances don’t align and, for whatever reason, the photographs are disappointing — or if I sense later that my subject is displeased — I feel a terrible shame. I gave a person reason to trust me, and they feel mistaken, misled.

For anyone working from life: is there an ethical responsibility to guarantee that the work is good? Making the work requires that the documentarian must a) override propriety to push for as much access as they dare, and b) adopt respectful investigative language, be serious, and as sensitive as possible, all in the hope that the finished product is good enough to dignify such measures. What’s hard to accept, as with Elizabeth’s performance, is that the work’s eventual quality can’t be guaranteed. Sometimes a work is bad because of things beyond our control. The above practices, which seem at the time like normal professionalism, come to seem like pointless manipulation. The inveiglement into a person’s life hasn’t been justified by the creation of good art.

Luckily May December is great. But there’s yet another layer of complexity to these questions, because for all its critique of Hollywood vampirism, the production of the film has replicated the same dynamic it calls to question. Fualaau, on whom the story was based (Letourneau died in 2020) was not consulted at any point during its development. “I’m offended by the entire project and the lack of respect given to me — who lived through a real story and is still living it,” he has said. (“This is my fucking life!” Joe shouts in May December). 

The filmmakers have been circumspect on this point. Writer Samy Burch — currently nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay — has distanced herself somewhat, describing Fualaau and Letourneau’s story as just a “jumping off point”.

Portman, sounding uncannily like Elizabeth:

“Most artists who tell stories want to hold up their ethical standpoint in the light. It can be vampiric to take human emotion and human story and capitalise on it and tell a story. But hopefully the energy that you come to it with is empathy and the curiosity to explore someone’s human behaviour and someone’s inner self. That it’s an act of empathy and not an act of bloodsucking.”

And Todd Haynes:

“A lot of narrative filmmaking and fiction-making has an internal desire to redeem oneself through the process, to sort of affirm one’s own aims. That’s the thing that I’m not particularly interested in as a director. And I’m drawn to actors who feel similarly, who are actually interested in creating a distance between maybe their own values and ideas and those portrayed in the character.”

This seems to me like a Get Out of Jail Free card: he’s interested in making films that don’t reflect his values, and so the decision not to approach Fualaau is not an ethical failure, but instead a commitment to artistic principle. The implication is that his ethics exist elsewhere, away from his work, and that filmmaking is a protected, amoral space whose status as art allows it to transcend ethical responsibility.

It’s all infinitely recursive, slippery and irresolvable, and that’s part of the point. May December is full of mirrors. Elizabeth and Gracie shoulder to shoulder, looking at each other through the glass at each other’s reflection, their own truths mutually inaccessible. Natalie Portman, an actress playing an actress, and speaking to the press in the same language of intelligent deflection that her character satirises. The audience in the dark of the theatre, watching a screen projection of a film crew.

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