I’ve seen nearly all of Todd Haynes’s works and have difficulty liking them. I remember renting SAFE and VELVET GOLDMINE from the Blockbuster Video I worked at and watching them on the same weekend. Both films were critically acclaimed, interesting stylistically, and had fantastic performances. Yet, the stories felt small and muted for me to fall in love with them. His best to date is still DARK WATERS, with Mark Ruffalo doing a knock-out Atticus Finch impersonation. Outside of FAR FROM HEAVEN, DARK WATERS is easily his most approachable movie. While all of Todd Haynes’s films are about the “complexities in the moral grey areas,” DARK WATERS works so well because although its theme maps to his other work, it follows simple journalist genre story beats to make it more approachable.
Sadly, MAY DECEMBER is not that approachable. At times, it feels like a Pedro Almodóvar experience without a compelling story, including the pulsating piano score and soap opera visual styles. The three main actors, Juliane Moore, Natalie Portman, and Charles Melton, are superb. Yet, in typical Haynes style, their story’s climaxes are too subtle to create the impact that should’ve been felt.
I genuinely believe there’s a version of this movie that could’ve been a must-see. Sadly, Haynes doesn’t tell it. Instead, he settles on a character study story template that doesn’t soar to the heights of DARK WATERS. I was supposed to be shocked upon leaving MAY DECEMBER. Instead, I was angry, exhausted, and kept thinking of the much more provocative SALTBURN as this year’s best sexually charged film.
Like the butterflies depicted in MAY DECEMBER, I was happy to take flight and move on to the next movie on my list.
It’s available to skip on Netflix.
