Well. Not in a very long time has my top three films of the year been of such an incredibly high calibre and although my number 2 and 3 slots both belong to two truly astounding epics that craft masterful narratives across years and years and multiple characters – I have without a doubt found my favourite film of the year with Todd Hayne’s truly astounding May December, a film that centralises on three people across just less than a week. Three watches since my first and the film only continues to blossom for me in my mind without faults rising in any case. For me there just simply is no element of this pitch-perfect film that doesn’t perfectly capture the exactness of Hayne’s vision and Samy Burch’s truly sensational masterpiece of a screenplay, certainly one of the finest writing debuts I have seen in some time. Add into the fold a trio of the finest performances of the year revealing not only new talent but also new talents for actors I’ve already loved the work of before. May December is a film that allows Haynes to do all that he does best and for my money at this stage what may very well be his greatest film thus far in a career that already features multiple masterpieces.
This is a film of incredible tight-rope status when it comes to its balance of melodrama and incredible subtlety, dark comedy and amazingly bold moments of performative physical comedy almost, never once winking too hard in any direction to reveal its hand or butcher the sincerity that is needed for the film’s ultimate arc of narrative to remain effective. The opening twenty or so minutes of this film for me has some of the funniest lines and deliveries of the year and then from that point on begins to blend further the elements of deeply intense human drama with pervasive subtler and darker comedic beats, ultimately giving way to one of the most emotionally effecting conclusions of the year. That in actuality is not the films sole conclusion, instead it is in triptych with two other finale moments; one that recontextualises the entire film as a dark tragic-comic gag almost and the other that plays with our perceptions and gives a final nail in the films complex coffin. This triptych of endings of course reflects the final moments of our three lead performances with Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore and Charles Melton who in each case I have found to be some of the most egregiously ignored Oscar nominations of recent memory. Portman is our lead and is a figure of such incredible complexity and such incredibly deft and subtle dark comedy, with lines of performance and perception being blurred with elements of mirroring Moore and further elements of her own personal motivations all leading an ingenious creation of a character. Portman is given an acting showcase moment with one of Burch’s stunning monologues that Haynes chooses to shoot in an incredibly bare and stripped down fashion, that is as daring, complex and riveting as anything that you will see this year. Moore too here is by no surprise truly excellent and at times one can see hers as the hardest role to pull off with such incredibly over-the-top camp coded moments that are as hilalrious as they are shocking and exaggerated. To go to those extremes is one thing, but to then play them off against in the same film moments of such incredible quiet villainy and vulnerability, in addition to playing all these elements with the same drip-feed of façade that Portman and Melton for that matter play with, gives us one of the supporting performances of the year for sure.
But to then introduce
into the fold the films heart and core with Charles Melton’s incredible work takes
this film to another level. Melton is so incredibly deft at subtlety and crafting
a performance of such impeccable eroding interiority and physicality that
despite this being a film featuring a series of such incredible emotional outbursts
up until that point, it is his final moments of release that paint the film
anew as a piece of truly profound art. Marcelo Zarvos stunning re-working of Michael
Legrand’s score for The Go-Between is perhaps the perfect microcosm of
the work of Haynes and Burch with his film, with it being a work that is more
literally of course direct adaptation but reflects in ways the work of Haynes
and Burch here to adapt, reflect and make grand and bold the stories of our
time and more importantly dissect the effect and horrors of the film-makers ability
to make the terrible, the illegal and the sickening grand and bold. Whilst
also making us laugh, squirm, reflect on art and reflect on real-life goings on.
Burch’s work is incredible and stunning and the perfect piece for a director
like Haynes who thrives in complexity and the balancing of such tones. This
movie has been swamped with questions; Is it camp? Is it melodrama? Is it a
comedy? Is it a drama? The answer is yes to all and it takes a master like
Haynes and the performers involved to make such a thing work.
10/10. Perfect in every way. Haynes manages to deliver in ways he has done before but in certain aspects excels to a whole new level of absolute creative control. Not one scene isn’t superb and the film easily without hyperbole for myself has at least five contenders for the best sequences of the year. Portman, Moore and Melton offer one of the finest trio of performances I have seen not only this year, but to be frank, this decade. This is a film of scintillating subversiveness and dark exploration. Burch’s script is simply one of the finest writing debuts of this or any year and is the foundational masterpiece of writing that becomes the foundation for a masterpiece of film. I really, truly cannot rave about this film enough, as the above review I am in no doubt has undoubtedly reflected.
P.S. The ultimate pain of writing this review belatedly is of course that I now cannot even lie to myself about Oscar chances or the possibility of a #MayDecemberSweep, with only the one nomination for Samy Burch’s incredibly deserving screenplay. Many have pointed to the way in which the film depicts the world of acting and the almost grave-robbing elements of certain real life stories being brought to the screen as they frequently are, and how in turn this could have been a touch too close to the bone for the actors that would have to vote for it. To be frank it is however that part of the film this is the exact sort of commentary I have been longing for in so many ways, something that manages to brutally and effectively depict the bitter lack of tact that is brought to so many of these true-story projects, with a final button that I actually saw coming from very, very early on and once it was revealed that that was to be the ultimate tragic final ‘gag’ of the feature I was less disappointed that I had seen where the film was going and more so resolute that Hayne’s and Burch’s vision was so pure, undistilled and tragically comic and bitter to the very end.
- - Thomas Carruthers
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