Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Julianne Moore, Natalie Portman, Charles Melton
Intro:
The dialogue is faultlessly naturalistic, the acting is uniformly good and, inevitably it seems, in the case of [Julianne] Moore, it’s superb.
In one sense, this is a high-concept movie: a woman meets an actress who will play her in a film. But, it’s also a complicated one, especially emotionally and thematically, and has quite a lot of – possibly too many – minor characters.
The setting is Savannah Georgia, aptly enough as there are echoes here of Tennessee Williams, minus most of the camp element. (And indeed, it feels like a play, even though there are a number of locales.) Julianne Moore plays Gracie, who sexually abused a 13-year-old boy and went to prison for it, but who is still with him – and they have children – about twenty years later. The story initially garnered massive attention from the tabloid media and is still in the public mind, and Gracie is still on the sex offenders list. An actress called Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) is about to play her on screen, and visits Savannah to meet her and hopefully find out a bit about what makes her tick. Gracie herself is, however, woefully lacking in self-awareness, and doesn’t seem to realise that she did anything wrong. Her victim and now husband Joe (Charles Melton) is, unsurprisingly, a bit of a mess.
May December is rather old-fashioned, but in a good way: it’s the kind of psychological drama we see too rarely these days. The soundtrack music is initially intrusive but soon ‘justifies’ its presence, and the whole thing gets us in and improves steadily from its somewhat shaky start. There’s a moral seriousness to it, and the overwrought style recalls Ingmar Bergman at his most intense. The dialogue is faultlessly naturalistic, the acting is uniformly good and, inevitably it seems, in the case of Moore, it’s superb.
May December also plays the Perth Arts Festival in December.
