You don’t act to make your living. You act in order to lie, to lie to yourself, to be what you can’t be and because you’ve had enough of being what you are… Acting! Do I know when I’m acting? Is there a moment where I stop acting?!
“Not enough hot dogs”
It seems as if there is nothing obscure where Gracie Atherton (Julianne Moore) and Joe Yoo (Charles Melton) live. The sunlight reflects off the crystalline water of the lake next to their big house in a peaceful Georgia suburb. Within, everything is illuminated and there’s no room for darkness to hide anything in. The only problem that this couple and their offspring could face is that there may not be enough hot dogs for the barbecues they host in their idyllic backyard. Yet there is something hazy in the household that will be brought into focus by a visitor, someone who will break the domestic harmony by bringing to the surface the conflictive origins of this couple: the actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), who will play Gracie in a film that will cover a period in the couples’ life that spans from 1992 to 1994.
When Gracie and Joe are shown the first time together on the screen, it seems that a mother and her son are being introduced. Yet it is not the age gap that unsettles, but the simmering complicity between the two, which gives rise to an uneasy mistrust. The same mistrust that Gracie feels towards Elizabeth: early on she expresses her suspicion towards “Hollywood stars” and “their dark glasses”. As the host anticipated, the actress will arrive to her house wearing sunglasses and a flamboyant hat. The image, in fact, builds on the iconography of Hollywood actresses. Portman evokes Gene Tierney’s Ellen Berent in Leave Her to Heaven, a character that exists in a “moral gray area”, as Elizabeth puts it during a lecture where she is asked how she chooses the characters she performs.
There is something about dark glasses that certainly elicits mistrust. They prevent us from seeing the eyes, the so-called “windows to the soul”, of the person that uses them. This leaves their essence in a “gray area”. May December is a film about “gray areas”, despite what the sunlit setting suggests. And, ultimately, the characters have a desire for the clarity that is brought by truthfulness: Elizabeth visits Gracie to get to know the woman and her story to “tell it right” as the latter demands. In 1992, Gracie and Joe met and started having an affair that appeared on the front page of every newspaper; she was thirty-six and he was thirteen. In the eyes of the Law, it was a case of pederasty; in Haynes’ world, it is a delightful (while uncomfortable) opportunity to explore the ethical roots of acting and the implications of playacting someone else’s life: it is an opportunity to explore what can (and cannot) be communicated of the other’s experience.

An Actress Prepares
“For what is an actor if not the man or woman with an immemorial passion: the passion to be another, which predisposes some among us to take it upon themselves to re-act the experience of others”, wrote Serge Daney in 1992. The French critic was concerned that reality TV, where individuals can perform themselves, threatened the existence of actors. Thirty-odd years later, after the rise of social media, May December is an exploration of this “immemorial passion”. Elizabeth presents herself as someone who takes the responsibility of re-acting Gracie’s delicate experience. Ultimately, she sees herself as an actress preparing to properly do her duty, which, in a very Stanislavskian fashion, means to get acquainted with Gracies’s life. The first step for doing so is to try Gracie’s hot dogs.
Elizabeth starts following and observing Gracie; more precisely, she accompanies her in her daily life. The actress attends the family’s reunions and comes along to buy a prom dress for Honor (Piper Curda), the Yoo-Athertons’ daughter. Elizabeth joins Gracie in attending her flower arranging classes. The preparation process is not distant. On the contrary, Haynes’ mise-en-scène diaphanously shows their close companionship. Portman and Moore are constantly put together in the frame. In frontal shots, they appear side by side; they rarely face each other and are seldom separated by means of editing.
Aside from sharing experiences with Gracie, Elizabeth does her research meticulously to study the person she will perform. She interviews people that are or were close to Gracie: one of her friends, her former husband Tom (D.W. Moffet) and Georgie (Cory Michael Smith), her son with Tom. She visits the pet shop where Gracie and Joe were caught in flagrante delicto. There, on the exact same spot, she pretends to be having sex. She looks at documentary material from the past and present: from sensationalist nineties’ magazines and TV programs that covered the Gracie and Joe affair to castings of teenagers who may play the latter in the movie. While Elizabeth does all of this, she is always taking notes. In other words, what Elizabeth does become more the job of a documentary filmmaker than that of an actress. Because, ultimately, the film in which she would play Gracie will be a work of fiction, an artifice; however, in May December, this is confronted with the need for verisimilitude that desires as much elements as possible to show the truth. Vraisemblance, as it was called in the theatrical tradition of French Classicism. “All films are about theatre: there is no other subject”, Jacques Rivette once wrote.

All about Jump-Cuts and Mirrors
The paradoxes of truth and fiction are not only present in the narrative but also in how the film is edited. Affonso Gonçalves’s editing reveals the contrast between experiencing Gracie’s life firsthand and compiling outsiders’ information about her. Whenever Elizabeth interviews someone about Gracie, the sequences are edited in the most conventional way: shot/reverse shot. This device aims to prevail spatial contiguity and narrative flow, so that the sutures in the editing are invisible, creating a naturalistic feeling. In May December, this is the most accurate way to show the testimonies about Elizabeth, as if it were a reportage with veracious information. However, the shot/reverse shot, paradoxically, in its attempt for proximity (spatial, narrative) creates a sense of distance.
In the sequences where Gracie and Elizabeth are seen together, contrastingly, Haynes and Gonçalves employ jump-cuts to join the shots. Inasmuch as the actress gets closer to the family, the editing evokes this sense of irruption by cutting within the same shot, erasing continuities in time and space. The device is very evident when Elizabeth dines at the Yoo-Athertons. With each jump-cut, Haynes and Gonçalves present us with many different angles and points of view, some of which place the spectator as another guest at their table. What this alternation and blurring of the axis evokes is the opposite of the effect the shot/reverse shot pattern has: a sense of intimacy arises, and with it, Elizabeth’s involvement in Gracie and Joe’s relationship acquires more complexity because with the different points of view in each shot a new perspective on the subject is gained.
Something similar happens in the scene where the two women accompany Honor to buy her prom dress. (The allegorical implications of the daughter’s name within the context of the couple that brought her to life and the kids’ prom as narrative arc in the film could be subjects for another essay.) Gracie and Elizabeth are framed, once again, frontally and sitting next to each other. Mirrors duplicate Gracie’s image, her reflection occupying most the frame.
The scene brings to mind C.G. Jung’s concept of the persona: “a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual…people really do exist who believe they are what they pretend to be.” In his book Theatres on Film: How Cinema Imagines The Stage, Shakespearean scholar Russell Jackson writes that “even without reference to specifically Jungian psychological theory, in its resonance with commonplace notions of performance the persona has clear relevance to the image of the performer. In this context, the dressing room mirror”—or, for our purpose, the dress store mirror—“becomes a powerful symbol”. This gives rise to many questions: is Gracie pretending to be different than the 36-year-old-woman she was when she met Joe? Does Elizabeth become Gracie by believing she is her? And, if present-day Gracie is different from the one who seduced Joe (and who is the one supposed to be portrayed in the film), which Gracie is Elizabeth performing? How does this contribute to the accuracy both are searching for, to “telling the story right”? There are no answers. All there is an ever-growing confusion to which mirrors and jump-cut are key.
Within the scene, there are three jump cuts that contribute to the sense of confusion, intimacy, and blending of the different personas. The first one is to a box of photographs. It constitutes an irruption in which the past, immortalized by means of a camera, is being looked at by Gracie and Elizabeth. The second jump-cut puts the point of view in the nearby dressing room where Honor is trying her clothes. Here, both women are seen laterally, which is the daughter’s perspective of them: somehow close, but at the same time elusive. The perspective of a young woman who is beginning to realize who her mother is as a woman, but is not quite there yet. The final cut returns to the point of view of the first shot in the sequence, but slightly changed: it is as if with every irruption, every change in closeness and change of perspective, a new image of the protagonists is created.

“This is not a story. It’s my fucking life.”
In the end, this happens not only to our female protagonists but also, and more deeply, to Joe. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Brutus tells Cassius that “the eye sees not itself / But by reflection, by some other things”. To this, some lines later, Cassius replies that, since Brutus cannot see himself, he will be the “glass” that “modestly will discover” that of Brutus he “yet not know of”. Getting to know Elizabeth will be that mirror for Joe.
As a part of her preparation, Elizabeth, of course, seduces Joe. For him, this will not only be a life mirror (both are thirty-six) but also some sort of time machine that takes him to his past life and the stages he jumped by bonding with a thirty-six-year-old woman when he was thirteen. He, thus, will be the teenager that he never was (or that he never stopped to be). Towards the film’s end, Joe will perform all the awkward, clumsy actions expected from an average teenage boy: he will smoke weed with his teenage children, almost causing him to fall off the roof; he will cum prematurely when having sex with Elizabeth. But the problem is that he is not a teenager anymore. In Daney’s text mentioned earlier, he writes that “experience escapes us” and “that’s why we need mediators”, like, for instance, actors. Elizabeth will be the mediator of the intense experiences of this whole family. However, in the end, “life experiences are incommunicable, and that is the case of solitude”, writes the critic, quoting Virginia Woolf. “This is not a story. It’s my fucking life”, Joe yells at Elizabeth. No matter how hard the actress tries to study to “tell the story right”, in the end, everyone is lonely, with their own experiences, their own lives. Acting is only a way to better understand that solitude.