Saturday, May 25, 2024

May December (2023)

IMDb plot summary: Twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, a married couple buckles under pressure when an actress arrives to do research for a film about their past.
Directed by Todd Haynes. Starring Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, and Charles Melton.

May December stars Julianne Moore and Charles Melton as an age gap couple who started dating when he was a young teenager, and Natalie Portman as the actress playing Moore's character in a biopic years later. She gets permission to study her subject to add some nuance to the character, and while the couple agrees at first, it ends up causing some trouble they didn't expect. Todd Haynes is an interesting filmmaker in that he seldom makes his characters or their circumstances easy to sum up, which makes for an occasionally frustrating but always engaging watch. Our three leads here are absolutely stunning. Moore and Portman are recognizable faces who here completely dissolve into their characters (and then Portman dissolves into Moore's character, which is another level of wildness), and Melton is an actor I wasn't familiar with previously but is so captivating in this film. My medium ranking of it reflects mostly how I'm not convinced that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts yet, but knowing Haynes' work it's also possible it just needs time to sit with me.

How it entered my Flickchart:
May December > Sarah, Plain and Tall
May December < Key Largo
May December < The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
May December > Sleepers
May December > Wristcutters: A Love Story
May December > The Black Phone
May December > Disney's Newsies The Broadway Musical
May December > Love, Life and Goldfish
May December < Don't Look Up
May December > The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)
May December > Nobody's Fool
Final spot: #1470 out of 3896, or 62%.

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