May December

Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore impress, though Todd Hayne's melodramatic exploration of taboo seems more like snippets of melody than a fully realized ballad.

Director Todd Haynes often employs the form of melodrama with films like “Far From Heaven” and “Carol.” At first it seemed like he was using it as a callback to the work of midcentury filmmakers like Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray, women-centered stories with overt appeals to emotionality and bitter romantic entanglements.

But Haynes also uses melodrama as a way to explore topics that are complicated and ambiguous. Take his newest, “May December,” starring Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman as a woman with a tabloid past and the actress preparing to play her in a movie, respectively.

Written by Samy Burch (from a story by Burch and Alex Mechanik), it’s loosely based on the real-life case of Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who seduced a 13-year-old student and bore his child. After being released from prison, she and her victim married and had more children, living a more or less “normal” life despite their scandalous start.

In the setting of “May December,” it’s now nearly a quarter-century later and Gracie (Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton) are a typical upper-middle-class Savannah, Ga., couple with one kid in college and two more about to leave the nest. Their staid existence is punctured when Elizabeth Berry (Portman), a moderately famous actress known mostly for television, comes to town for a couple of weeks to do research in preparation for playing Gracie in a feature film.

The reason to see this movie are the performances of Moore and Portman, who both give subtle, layered turns as complex women navigating the strange circumstances that have brought them together. Gracie seems chipper and open to being portrayed on film, and Elizabeth projects the polite, respectful demeanor of someone who wants to honor her subject’s truth.

Neither is being completely honest with each other, or themselves.

It’s a premise full of promising ingredients that doesn’t feel quite fully baked. Haynes’ exploration of taboo contains snippets of melody that don’t come together in a fully realized ballad.

Part of the problem is the figure of Joe, who comes across as an inarticulate doofus who just isn’t very smart or complicated.

We soon come to understand the motivations of Gracie and Elizabeth, the seemingly cordial exchanges between them masking their deeper, darker intent. Gracie doesn’t want her seemingly happy life upended by a cinematic rehash of events now at far remove. Elizabeth looks down upon Gracie, as everyone secretly does, and sees her “story” as a juicy part that will lift her career prospects.

Joe is just… well, Joe.

Melton isn’t given a lot to do by the script other than stand around, take orders from Gracie and brood. Ostensibly he should be the most compelling figure, as he’s the victim both women exploit for their own purposes. But he comes across as a hapless object of events carrying him along.

Joe gets a couple of scenes on his own away from the womenfolk. We watch him interact with his teen son (Gabriel Chung) and chain-smoking father (Kelvin Han Yee), and it’s all curt, repressed dudespeak. He’s even gifted with a hobby of nurturing monarch butterflies from chrysalis to adult to represent the transformation that the boy-man himself has never undergone.

Standing in between these two powerful women locked in a silent contest of wills, Joe stands inert, and uninteresting.

It’s made clear early on that he and Elizabeth harbor an unspoken attraction to each other. She notes they are the same age, 36, which is also how old Gracie was when she began her affair with Joe. While she is preparing to marry — to some vague Hollywood type only heard on the phone — Joe is about to become an empty-nester.

Elizabeth easily winds him around her little figure, and we wonder at her intentions. Is this just part of her acting “process,” flirting with the prospect of sharing the same off-limits attraction for Joe that Gracie once did? Is this a way of hurting a woman she has come to deplore?

Much is made of the attention Elizabeth commands in sleepy Savannah, drawing stares and admiring outbursts in shops and restaurants. At one point she agrees to sit in with the high school acting class of Joe and Gracie’s other daughter, Honor (Piper Curda). There she receives a wildly inappropriate question from a mouthy twerp, which she responds to in a way so honest she outjumps his transgression.

This, I suspect, is Hayne’s real subject: taboo. “May December” is intended as an exploration of dishonor, how people live with it and try to move on. Gracie has blanketed herself in layers of denial so thick she can’t acknowledge how people really feel about her, including her own family. Her kids, who all resemble Joe with his dusky good looks, can barely hide their contempt for her.

“I am naive. I always have been,” she says to Elizabeth. “In a way, it’s been a gift.”

The music by Marcelo Zarvos is big, crashing, deliberately noticeable string chords that arrive suddenly, almost like a military landing. Haynes borders on satire at times in stressing the melodramatic, idiosyncratic flourishes — like Gracie’s slightly sibillant speech, which Elizabeth begins to reproduce as she builds her thespian doppelganger.

Somewhere there’s a really good movie in here. The lead actresses are worth the price of admission on their own; I just wish the rest of the movie stood up to their talents.

“May December” will enjoy a limited theatrical run starting Nov. 17 before hitting Netflix streaming Dec. 1.