In “May December,” there’s trouble in the paradise of Savannah, Georgia, where the skeins of Spanish moss draped over corridors of trees wave in the gentle coastal zephyrs with each night’s picture-perfect sunset. Spouses Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton) have opened their palatial home for a backyard BBQ; he’s manning the grill, and she’s darting about trying to make everything just right, each well aware of their role to play. We first get the inkling of something off as the guest of honor, A-lister Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), paces about her temporary lodgings in town and describes the beautiful hotel as “quaint” before complaining about a driver with the temerity to speak to her. She may very well be the haughty Tinseltown type Gracie’s anticipating, but we know for sure that something’s amiss when the hostess peeks in her fridge and declares, “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs” to an ominous musical sting and a zoom-in right out of Moore’s tenure on “As the World Turns” one lifetime ago.
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Like the superlative dramedy soon to unspool around this fragile idyll, the moment has been expertly pitched between irony and sincerity by director Todd Haynes, at once arch about his humor (Will Ferrell numbers among the producers) and earnest in his emotional inventories. Elizabeth has come to study Gracie, weeks away from portraying her in a movie based on some things she did during the ’90s — twentyish years before the film’s 2015 setting — and the self-serious thespian shares Haynes’ objective to get inside of a figure that defies easy understanding. Joe and Gracie’s courtship played out under unusual circumstances, to put it mildly: she was an adult, he was the seventh-grader making minimum wage as her helper at a pet store, and their love fueled months of tabloid obsession as she gave birth to his twins from inside prison. Enough time has passed that they now outwardly resemble any other couple, but as the actor prepares, she’ll find some squishy, moldering emotions under the psychological rocks she’s here to overturn. 
The Atherton-Yoos would like to believe that their still-intact relationship and the beautiful life they’ve built around it prove that their initial attraction was no aberration, but their dynamic follows the unmistakable contours of parent and child. He spends his afternoons plopped on the couch with a longneck PBR and yet another rerun of “This Old House” while she counts the beers he’s had and asks him to move his amateur lepidoptery gear as if ordering him to clean up his toys. Elizabeth can smell dysfunction like a Method bloodhound, and not unlike meddlesome interloper Terence Stamp in “Teorema,” she takes evident pleasure in pushing the buttons of all those around her through offhanded seduction. Actors, as we all know, are bottomless pits of careerist self-interest, and this one sees real people as little more than material for an alchemical process Haynes nevertheless takes seriously. More than the simple emulation of voice and appearance, performance straddles the visceral and cerebral, a transmutation symbolized with one stunning framing that flanks Portman with two reflections of Moore. 
In recent years, Portman has gravitated towards biopics that challenge her to transform her exterior and access the interiority of unknowable women; for all of its many merits, “May December” is most fascinating as a star-text taking us behind the scenes as she restored a dignified humanity to the diaper astronaut lady. Her brittle, detached demeanor in the film makes for daring self-reflexive commentary on her image as a hyper-mannered screen presence, though everyone’s in top form here. Moore plays to her strengths as a basket case barely holding it together, but the real revelation is Melton, previously best known as the hotted-up Reggie on TV’s “Riverdale.” In no fewer than three leveling scenes, he reveals the frightened boy beneath his male-model exterior, all raw, exposed nerves articulated in the quavering voice of a kid standing up for himself for the very first time.
Haynes studied semiotics in his college days and the theory by which signs assume meaning weighs heavily on Elizabeth as she mimics Gracie’s makeup ablutions or minor mannerisms. She’s looking for the difference between an impression and a becoming and doesn’t give much thought to any casualties she might incur on the way to her notion of the truth. Despite her callous self-absorption and the irreducible taboo of the ripped-from-the-headlines premise, wisps of intimacy slip through the mutual guardedness between subject and player, likened here to a word and its referent. Just because something’s make-believe, whether a creative rendering or the quotidian detail of a marriage, that doesn’t mean it’s any less real. With his masterly manipulation of tone and perspective, Haynes ensures that we can feel that much even as the characters can’t bear to accept it. [A-]
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