May December: Acutely disturbing

May December (2023) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated R, for sexual content, graphic nudity, profanity and drug use

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.8.23

This is a profoundly uncomfortable film.

 

It’s also an acting tour de force by stars Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman: no surprise, since director Todd Haynes has a long-established talent for eliciting delicately nuanced performances in what are essentially two-character dramas (2015’s Carol and 2002’s Far from Heaven leap to mind).

 

At first blush, Joe (Charles Melton) and Gracie (Julianne Moore) seem a happy couple,
mutually devoted to each other. But still — and quite unwholesome — waters run deep...

But while those earlier films also explored the dangerous paths of “forbidden” relationships, the broken taboo this time — in Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik’s increasingly unsettling script — will be a challenge for conservative viewers.

(Sadly, the story is inspired by actual 1996 events; look up Mary Kay Letourneau.)

 

The year is 2015. Celebrated actress Elizabeth Berry (Portman) has traveled to the oak- and Spanish moss-laden neighborhoods of Savannah, Ga., in order to study Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Moore), the woman she’ll play in her next movie.

 

Gracie’s claim to fame? Back in 1992, at the age of 36 — a wife and mother — she was caught having sex with 13-year-old Joe Yoo, in the storeroom of the pet store where he worked alongside her son Georgie. She was arrested and imprisoned, had a child while behind bars, then divorced her husband and married Joe upon release: all of which fueled long-running, scandalized headlines in mainstream and tabloid publications.

 

Now, 23 years later, Gracie and Joe (Charles Melton) have three children: college-age Honor (Piper Curda) and twins Mary (Elizabeth Yu) and Charlie (Gabriel Chung), the latter two about to graduate from high school. Elizabeth has been invited, with Gracie’s full support, to “shadow” her and her family for several days.

 

Gracie also has instructed everybody to cooperate, to every extent possible.

 

(The casualness of such encouragement is just as unsettling as the situation itself. Which also speaks volumes about Gracie’s character.)

 

At first blush, Elizabeth finds the environment warm and inviting. Many folks — notably Mary — are dazzled by the mere presence of a celebrity in their midst. Joe is amiable and accommodating: a doting parent and husband.

 

But cracks surface; what seems warm actually is quietly stifling. Gracie soon reveals her true colors as a control freak (which Moore plays with chilling persuasiveness). When Elizabeth joins Mary and her mother when the girl selects a new dress to wear beneath her graduation gown, what should be a celebratory moment turns wincingly embarrassing, thanks to Gracie’s manipulative, left-handed “compliment.” (Yu’s expression, at this moment, is shattering.)

 

Richard Jewell: Grim slaughter of innocents

Richard Jewell (2019) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for profanity and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang

Perhaps the most reprehensible lingering disgrace in the ordeal suffered by Richard Jewell — during a lengthy nightmare laden with hourly indignities — is the fact that, to this day, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution maintains that it behaved responsibly.

Centennial Park security officer Richard Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser, center) points law
enforcement officers to a suspicious-looking backpack that has been abandoned
beneath a bench near the sound-and-light tower adjacent to the performance stage,
where Jack Mack and the Heart Attack are entertaining thousands of fans.

To borrow a phrase from the younger generation, I call BS.

Jewell deserves to be remembered solely as the hero who, while working as a security guard at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, discovered a bomb-laden backpack and helped evacuate the crowded area before it exploded. He undoubtedly saved many, many lives.

Instead, he’s more likely remembered as the hapless individual who, three days later, was identified as the probable suspect who planted the bomb, thanks to an overzealous FBI investigation, inflammatory “reporting” by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the hundreds of media outlets that subsequently fanned the flames. 

Despite being cleared after an 88-day siege by media and all manner of law enforcement, Jewell undoubtedly remained a question mark in the minds of many, particularly since nobody initially was arrested for the heinous crime. It’s easy to imagine the rumor-mongering: “Maybe he did do it, but the FBI just didn’t have enough evidence…”

Even when Eric Rudolph confessed to being the bomber after being arrested in 2003, there was no way to wholly eradicate the avalanche of accusatory publicity that had buried Jewell and his equally hapless mother for 88 days. Retractions and “fresh truth” rarely have the impact of three months’ worth of screaming headlines.

Director Clint Eastwood and scripter Billy Ray — adapting Marie Brenner’s mesmerizing profile of Jewell, in the February 1997 Vanity Fair — have done their best to restore his honor, in a compelling drama fueled by powerhouse performances from Paul Walter Hauser and Kathy Bates, as Richard and his mother, Bobi. The result is a terrifying cautionary tale about the fragility of one’s place in society, and the ease with which an ordinary life can be ruined by authority and bad publicity.

Jewell’s ordeal truly is straight out of Kafka.