In the Flesh: May December

Gracie (Julianne Moore) stands before her open refrigerator. A flurry of strings build tension as she stares with vacant, dull-eyed dread into its interior until the music crescendos with a scare chord straight out of Psycho, a sound like crystal cracking under a shroud of velvet. “I’m not sure we have enough hot dogs,” she whispers, her tone that of a doctor informing a family of their child’s terminal illness. Her life is full of little things. Flowers stemmed too short for an arrangement, quail shot on the wing and carved into delicate portions, a screaming meltdown over a canceled cake order, and, of course, her much-younger husband, Joe (Charles Melton), who she met and with whom she first initiated sex when she was 36 and he 13. Director Todd Haynes often frames Joe, muscular, handsome, and physically imposing, as small and vulnerable, as when he positions him almost comically behind a tremendous gas grill, a stunted little parody of suburban fatherhood. His body language frequently veers into the childish and reactive, arms pulling in, mouth shrinking into a trembling line, his adult frame contorted around his small and undeveloped feelings.

Even his own children have outpaced Joe. His 17-year-old son Charlie (Gabriel Chung) first bemusedly, then with palpable sadness, guides him through smoking weed and getting high for the first time. His eldest daughter Honor (Piper Curda) fences deftly with Gracie, drawing attention to her controlling, undermining histrionics in ways Joe struggles to even approach. Honor’s sardonic story about being given a scale as her graduation present is boiling with the particular superior, taunting resentment of a young person much smarter and better-adjusted than their stunted, abusive parent but still unable or unwilling to separate from them. All three of the film’s young performers, who have grown up in the shadow of their parents’ infamous romance, deliver textured and interesting performances, an essential component of the film’s success as a narrative about child sexual assault. It quietly forces us to confront the simultaneous full personhood and deep vulnerability of children, as when Joe speaks totally without self-consciousness of bringing endangered Monarch butterfly caterpillars inside to shield them from the dangers of metamorphosis in the wild. “Not in the bedroom,” Gracie, impervious to irony, tells him.

But beneath Moore’s manipulative, reactive, revolting nightmare of a personality and Joe’s constricted pain and affect is a much more malicious and developed avatar of exploitation: up-and-coming actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), set to star as Gracie in a movie based on the couple’s infamous meeting and “courtship”. Portman is an absolute delight in the role, palpably getting off on the misery she pricks and squeezes out of Gracie and her family and taking pleasure in her effortless psychosexual penetration of their dysfunctions, both repellent and pitiable. She plays with these sad, broken, disgusting people like a cat with a half-dead mouse, then turns to us and lets us in with a wink on their sordid little secrets. Her dramatic recitation, straight into the camera, of a deranged “love letter” Gracie wrote to a 13-year-old Joe is one of the most skin-crawlingly horrible things in recent theatrical memory. When we finally see the movie enter production it’s as sleazy and artless as one could hope, complete with Elizabeth as Gracie draped over a black leather couch and caressing a snake in the back of the pet store where soon she’ll rape the adolescent Joe. Samy Burch’s script is a nightmare from which you can’t wake brought to life by actors who feel more like Miltonian demons than people. An incredible, searing, hysterical achievement.