Samy Burch, “May December” (nominee, best original screenplay).
My Oscar Book
Loosely inspired by true events, May December follows the relationship between Gracie Atherton (Julianne Moore) and husband Joe (Charles Melton), who met as pet shop co-workers when he was 13, as actor Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) prepares to play Gracie in an upcoming film.
Grade: B (*** out of *****)
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Release poster
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In 2015, actress Elizabeth Berry arrives in Savannah, Georgia, to research her upcoming role in an indie.
Elizabeth will be playing Gracie Atherton-Yoo, who, in 1992 at the age of 36, was caught having sex 13-year-old Korean-American Joe Yoo, a schoolmate of her son Georgie, at the pet store where they both worked.
During a prison sentence, Gracie gave birth to Joe’s child. 23 years later, Gracie and Joe are married with three children: Honor, who is at college, and twins Charlie and Mary, who are about to graduate from high school
First-time screenwriter Burch skillfully depicts the legal, moral and emotional complexities of the couple’s unconventional romance.
But she wrestled with one scene where Elizabeth receives a letter from early in their courtship that unlocks some powerful truths about Gracie.
The scene arrives late in story, and the characters had already been established, but Burch (and Elizabeth) still had several questions to answer. “It was just being intentional — for this letter, what does it need to feel like? What do we need to learn?”
The revelation of the letter exposes viewers to the center of an onion whose layers she begins peeling the first time Elizabeth meets Gracie and Joe.
“It sort of unwraps the foundation that causes the rest of it,” she says. “My hope was always that whoever watch the story would feel this mix of the dark humor and the real genuine sincerity and humanity.”
Though well-crafted, May December is an uncomfortable movie to watch–by design.
It is never clear what director Haynes really feels about the material and characters. He struggles with establishing the right tone–an uneasy blend of dark humor, cynical mood, and stylized artifice–in several individual scenes, leaving the undeniable impression that he himself is ambivalent about what he shows and how he shows it.
The allusions to Bergman’s Persona are admirable in intent, if ultimately unearned in execution. May December is too shallow and predictable to even come close to Bergman’s 1966 masterpiece.
May December is one of the most overestimated pictures of the year.
