There seem to be, primarily speaking, two questions at the haunted heart of Todd Haynes’ May December. The first is fairly obvious: How can we, as people in a regularly functioning society, reconcile stories like that of Mary Katherine “Mary Kay” Fualaau (formerly Letourneau), the Washington state teacher who was convicted of second-degree rape of a child in 1997, had two children with the victim while he was a minor, and later married Vili Fualaau after two stints in prison and the completion of his coming-of-age? It feels important to name these two from this particular instance of an illicit teacher-student “relationship,” because, although such cases happened before and have happened since to various other people, this one seems cut from a very particular cloth.
Yes, the names of those involved are changed, likely for legal reasons to do with the Fualaau family (the pair divorced in 2019, and the elder half of the couple passed away in 2020), but Julianne Moore, who plays a woman with exactly the same story as the real Mary Kay Fualaau, appears in prop photographs with precisely the same hairstyle and cut. Charles Melton, meanwhile, stars here as the victim-turned-husband, and his real-life counterpart’s Samoan descent could more or less have been adapted into the actor’s half-Korean lineage. Call a spade a spade, and all that: It is impossible to watch the film without thinking of the true story, although Haynes and screenwriter Samy Burch have concocted a narrative that offers a bit of a respite from having to consider the details for too long.
This is not merely the story of Mary Kay and Vili, told by of the fictionalized figures Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Moore) and her husband Joe (Melton). Such a story could probably be told, either with the salaciousness that accompanies it or with some degree of humanity that might let its most problematic character off the hook a little too eagerly. Instead, here is a movie that contends with a legitimate moral scandal by way of an artistic endeavor within the movie itself. A film is being made by a faceless director and a major, award-winning actress, who is set to play Gracie within this movie and has arranged to spend a few months in their presence.
Here, then, is a troubling and troublesome story given just the right amount of distance from the audience, so as to allow them an out of sorts from caring directly about Gracie and her highly criminal actions. Brilliantly, though, Haynes, Burch and Moore, whose performance is subtle and expressive enough to accomplish this, do afford Gracie with enough humanity to give her the benefit of the doubt on the humanistic front. The film does not apologize or attempt to make any excuses for the woman. She is, very much so, the antagonist in this story. What she does not appear to be, though, is a pathologically malicious woman of any real sort.
As for the actress, well, Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) arrives in a whirlwind of attention, latching onto an old, gaping wound within the surrounding community and attempting to turn it into the breeding ground for performance art. Portman is uncanny here in the role of a woman who has been tasked (or has tasked herself) with trying to understand the inexplicable, which inspires strange, uncomfortable conversations with the likes of Gracie’s ex-husband Tom (D.W. Moffett) and their firstborn son (Cory Michael Smith), both of whom have developed a lot of trauma responses to the prospect of their former wife and mother’s new life.
Melton, meanwhile, is heartbreaking as a still relatively young man whose entire youth was stolen from him by early fatherhood (some of it spent alone, one imagines, while the mother was in prison). Now, the 36-year-old faces the prospect of an empty nest, as his last children go off to college, with a wife for whom his suddenly complex feelings are bringing up issues of legality and morality. May December is fascinating, often surprisingly funny, and utterly engaging as an exploration of the artistic process, but it’s just as engaging and sincere as an exploration of what the artistic process even means in the face of strange human tragedy.
Photo courtesy of Netflix
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