Todd Haynes’ May December (USA, 2023) is based on the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal of the late nineties, wherein the 34-year-old married elementary school teacher initiated an intimate love relationship with one of her sixth-grade students, Vili Fualaau, a 12-year-old boy of Samoan heritage. In 1997, she was charged with second-degree child rape; their first child, a daughter, had been born just before sentencing, and her lawyer managed to reduce her sentence to six months incarceration, three suspended. She was forbidden from seeing the Fualaau boy, now caring for the child, as well as her five children from her previous marriage to Steve Letourneau. A few weeks after her 3-month release, she was discovered with Fualaau in her car again; her original pre-reduction sentence was reinstated – seven-and-a-half years – and she gave birth to their second child, another daughter, while in prison. Fualaau’s mother assumed custody of them while Mary Kay served her full sentence. By the time of her release, Fualaau had turned twenty-one, and got the no-contact order against her reversed. They married soon after.
As Haynes’ film opens, Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) is awaiting the arrival of the actress who will be playing her in a TV movie. Her husband Joe Yoo (Charles Melton) and a neighbor friend Rhonda (Andrea Frankle) are helping her put out a spread for a backyard cookout, and two of their kids have some of their high-school-aged friends over. They live in Savannah, GA, on one of the islands. The actress is Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), well-known as the star of TV’s Norah’s Ark, a long-running show about a wildlife veterinarian. Everyone’s initially friendly, albeit from an unobtrusive personal distance, but Elizabeth chats up Rhonda, the daughter Mary (Elizabeth Yu) and a few of her friends. (Here, Mary is a fraternal twin with her brother Charlie [Gabriel Chung] – the oldest daughter is away at school.)
The next day, Joe finds some tiny eggs on a plant leaf in the garden – he likes to collect the eggs, place them in wooden birdcages, and incubate the eggs until they hatch as monarch butterflies, a diminishing species. Meanwhile, Elizabeth joins Gracie at a craft class for flower decoration with more of her neighbors, and then comes over to the house for dinner, where she and Joe are amiably receptive to Elizabeth’s further questions about their marriage. Over the next few days, Elizabeth makes more biographical headway. She has coffee with Gracie’s first husband Tom (D.W. Moffett), who has remarried and moved on, along with the original five kids. She meets the owner of the pet store where Gracie found managerial work; the store belonged to the owner’s mother, and they brought on Gracie to help Mom out. After a while, Gracie asked for another worker – perhaps a kid on part-time minimum wage. And young Joe Yoo applied for the job. Later, Elizabeth meets Morris Sperber (Lawrence Arancio), the attorney who represented Gracie at trial. “She said ‘We’re in love – I didn’t mean for it to happen, but we fell in love.’ She didn’t think she did anything wrong – head-over-heels, a good-looking kid…” While talking, they run into Georgie (Cory Michael Smith), one of Gracie’s children with Tom, now a derisive acting-out post-adolescent egotist. ”You can see the situation is not without its casualties,” observes Morris.
There’s a reason this script is Oscar-nominated – it’s a well-structured story from beginning to gobsmacking end, and each written character is given smart boundaries the actors can trust while taking advantage of the creative space afforded to each. (Samy Burch is an NYU-trained writer who primarily paid her bills as a casting director, and Alex Mechanik is an editor and technical jack-of-all-trades who worked with Burch on the story. It’s their first feature-film screenplay.) The Oscar acting categories are a buzzsaw this year; I’m not surprised neither Moore nor Portman were nominated. They’re two actresses with divergent styles, which actually enhances the friction between the characters. It’s a shame Charles Melton couldn’t wedge into the Supporting Actor list – his is the subtlest turn of the three, with real calmness and gravity, and he’s heartbreaking in his own unique way.
One of the questions I’ve learned to ask myself concerning challenging films like this is “Who Cares About These People?” Lots of people won’t bother with the film because of the subject matter, and, indeed, won’t feel they have the two hours to invest in it. Others are genuinely interested in the psychological aspects of these people, and Burch’s work here will reward their curiosity. But for as interesting as these characters are, the film demonstrates levels of manipulation, opportunism and denial that almost beg that question I’ve learned to ask. There’s some astonishing artistry in play here – you’ll have to decide for yourself if, after seeing it, you’ll want to avidly talk about it over cocktails with pals, or head directly home for a shower. Me, I’ll spring for the first round.
Currently streaming on Netflix.
Koji Yakusho is one of the most well-known and hardest-working actors in Japan. Tampopo, Shall We Dance? The Eel, Cure, Memoirs Of A Geisha, Babel and 13 Assassins are some of his better-known projects here in the west among his current total of 115 films, and he’s made three more since having done our film today, Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (Japan, 2023). Wenders, of course, has a similarly broad C.V., topped, in my view, with Wings Of Desire and Paris, Texas, as well as his current 3-D documentary “Anselm,” a beautiful survey of Anselm Kiefer’s monumental artworks and the concepts behind them. Did I mention it’s in 3-D? It’s wonderful.
Yakusho plays Hirayama, an unassuming hard-working fellow who cleans the (seemingly already) pristine and modernized public toilets in downtown Tokyo (they even have little bidet jets!). There are certainly worse jobs, but these workers aren’t exactly admired, either – thankfully, the occasional disaster is only described, not illustrated. In any case, Hirayama is perfectly content with his daily responsibilities, focused and efficient. His day-to-day is very Kant-like: how he wakes up on his own every day, his morning routine, when he eats lunch, what music he listens to in his Tokyo Toilet van from stop-to-stop, where he goes after work, when and what he reads, what time he sleeps – but it’s all pleasantly regular, rather than obsessive or humorlessly diligent. When he steps out his front door, he looks up and around, taking it in and looking forward to his day. He lunches in nearby parks, admiring how the trees affect his view of the sky, and vice-versa; he likes to take pictures of this with a standard camera. He rarely talks, but he’s friendly nonetheless, nodding cheerfully, opening doors and acknowledging others. He’s present in all of the good ways. He uses the public bathhouse (also clean and civilized), tends small plants at home, and bicycles everywhere on his off-hours.
Hirayama’s “perfect days” are what he aspires to, and mostly succeeds at, but reality occasionally intrudes. His young helper for cleaning toilets, young loose-cannon Takashi (Tokio Emoto) can be vexing, and there are issues with his larger family. His niece, Niko (Arisa Nakano) likes her uncle and visits him, whether she’s told Mom or not. But she’s always welcome, and he always lets his sister know she’s there.
There’s nothing narratively complex happening here, and it’s all blessedly unsentimental. But it’s also a lovely way to spend two hours, a visually captivating chronicle of a small slice of humanity. There should be six movies a year just like this, but most filmmakers muck it up with earnestness and Valuable Lessons™. As I’ve mentioned, the International Film Oscar this year belongs to The Zone Of Interest, but the other nominees are well worth watching this year. This one, especially.
Opens at the Music Box and other area theaters on Friday, February 9th, 2024.
Periscope In The Bathtub 