May December

Todd Haynes' May December is such a smart movie. It’s also like this weirdly mysterious gothic potboiler thing that veers into Lee Daniels’ Waterboy territory but—I can’t believe I’m gonna say this—in a good way. It feels very Robert Altman’s 3 Women at times, but then it takes a very sensitive and smart approach to some of the characters, offering them a generous gaze. The other definite intertext here is Mark Robson's Peyton Place: those shots of butterflies emerging reminded me of the flowers blooming in that classic 1957 melodrama. Anyway, this whole thing is just really careful and smart and campy, and I was really into it.

The danger with this film, I think, is that people have been taking it all a bit too sincerely, as if the movie is like some kind of deeply honest exposé of these central characters. But the whole point of offering us the plot of a shallow (but very good) Hollywood actress attempting to get into a character, of seeing these people as a "story" rather than people, is to give May December a particular kind of camp framework, one that makes the whole thing more fun and interesting to me than doing some kind of "real" story.

Another thing I want to note is Haynes's attachment to melodrama as a form. May December is definitely a melodrama (the music—cribbed from The Go-Between—is hilariously rich in this), but Jonathan Goldberg's book Melodrama helps us understand what Haynes is doing with this form: and that is that he is attempting to stage the warring pieces within ourselves, our deeply conflicting desires. What looks like over-the-top dramatics is perhaps better examined as an attempt on the part of the characters to find something real, to figure out their own deeply divided selves. (And us, of course: our own deeply divided selves.)

The more I think about May December the more I like it.