Metacritic-Rezensionen

It’s about acting, denial, wrongdoing and the age of consent, but also about growing up, and the different ways we tread through that process, or fail to.

May December feels like a return to Haynes’s outre origins, a stylish character study that, when inspected closer, may actually have an entire culture—its art, its sexual mores—on its nimble mind.

Haynes’ tonal playfulness has sometimes been overshadowed by the unerring consistency of his emotional textures, but here, in the funniest and least “stylized” of his films, it’s easier than ever to appreciate his genius for using artifice as a vehicle for truth.

Despite a heavy-handed cocoon motif that sometimes spells out the story’s themes to a fault, Haynes has done something spellbinding here: heady, grown-up and committed to a refreshing dose of moral ambiguity at a time in cinema where moral pandering sadly seems to be the default.

May December is delivered with a cool, shrewd precision by Todd Haynes, Julianne Moore carries off her dysfunctional queenliness very watchably and Natalie Portman has a great scene where she gives a lecture on acting to Gracie’s children’s high school drama class.

Haynes makes intriguing work of subtly metafictional psychodrama in May December.

It’s a thorough dive into the psychology of everyone involved, not least of all the woman who’d be drawn to play such a role.

It’s a closely focused character study, galvanised by the tremendous performances from Portman and Moore, which delves into areas more conventional dramas don’t go near.

The director is poking around in territory that’s familiar to him — self-knowledge and public perception, identity and duality, transparency and performance, social norms and the sexual outlaw. But the emotional volatility of the story ends up being somewhat muted by the approach.

May December also comes coloured by the lurid downlight of tabloid culture. It could be a pastiche of a psychological thriller, or a playfully misdirected daytime afternoon soap.