Producers: Natalie Portman, Sophie Mas, Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler, Grant S. Johnson, Tyler W. Konney, Jessica Elbaum, Will Ferrell   Director: Todd Haynes   Screenplay: Samy Burch   Cast: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, Cory Michael Smith, Elizabeth Yu, Gabriel Chung, Piper Curda, D.W. Moffet, Lawrence Arancio, Joan Reilly and Charles Green  Distributor: Netflix

Grade: A-

The contemporary obsession with true crime podcasts and dramatizations is satirically skewered by Todd Fields in “May December.”  The script by Samy Burch is inspired by the case of Mary Kay Latourneau, the thirty-five year old Washington State teacher who pleaded guilty to the rape of a child for her sexual relationship with a twelve-year old student in her sixth-grade class. (She had two children with him and they married after her release from prison.)  The case became a national sensation in the late nineties.

But “May December” isn’t actually about Latourneau and her “victim” Vili Fualaau.  Instead it uses their relationship, and the publicity furor it caused, as a model to explore the inner realities of such cases and the fascination they carry.  When the film begins, Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) and her husband Joe Yoo (Charles Melton) are living as an ostensibly happy couple in Savannah, Georgia more than twenty years after the affair that drew public attention and condemnation.  (Here it commenced not at school, but in the storage room of a pet shop where both worked.)  Their oldest daughter Honor (Piper Curda) is already off at college, and her younger siblings Mary (Elizabeth Yu) and Charlie (Gabriel Chung) are about to graduate from high school.

Into their lives comes Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), a popular TV actress preparing to star in an “independent film” about their story.  She’s arranged to spend some time with the family to prepare for playing Gracie in a supposedly honest but empathetic way.  Gracie and Joe welcome her, and she’ll talk with them and their children, as well as others in their circle, like Gracie’s first husband Tom Atherton (D.W. Moffett); Georgie (Cory Michael Smith), her son by that first marriage; Gracie’s lawyer Morris Sperber (Lawrence Arancio); Sperber’s wife Lydia (Joan Reilly); and even Mr. Henderson (Charles Green), the proprietor of the now-infamous pet shop.

Haynes and Burch, a casting director turned feature screenwriter, don’t opt for an obvious comic tone in depicting the effect of the star’s visit on the family.  Instead they contrive a troubling, somber study, but one shot through with dark, edgy humor that sneaks up on you.  The result is funny, unsettling and poignant by turns, but still feeling all of a piece rather than a disjointed composite. Thus when Elizabeth arrives, it’s in the middle of a cookout Gracie and Joe are hosting.  It seems festive, but a box is delivered that tells of the continuing harassment of the couple, and though there are quite a few guests, Sperber will later acknowledge that their supporters in town are relatively few, and they remain, generally speaking, pariahs. 

And while Gracie and Joe put on a happy public front, their relationship is beset with difficulties.  She’s a domineering sort whose attention to detail reveals her controlling streak, and whose fragility beneath the surface is demonstrated when an order for one of the elegant cakes she bakes and sells is abruptly cancelled.  Joe, by contrast, is subdued and considerate; supporting the family as an x-ray technician, he has a hobby raising Monarch butterflies, an endangered species, and releasing them when they’re grown.  The implication is obvious.

As for Elizabeth, she exudes empathy for Gracie and Joe, but it’s her ambition to use the bio-project to win recognition as a serious actress that’s clearly paramount.  Her willingness to push boundaries is often unsettling—when she visits the pet store, she presses the uneasy owner to leave her alone in the storage room where Gracie and Joe made love (and imagines their passion), and when she addresses Mary’s drama class, she responds to a question about doing sex scenes with unbecoming openness.  But her determination to “get inside” the Gracie-Joe relationship becomes abundantly clear only when she finds herself alone with him in her hotel room.  Of course, the scene is revealing about Joe’s attitude as well. 

Gracie, of course, is not fooled, and the gamesmanship between the two women is riveting, particularly as played by actors of the quality of Moore and Portman.   The former’s reactions to the latter’s effusive exhibitions of interest in her are priceless, as are the latter’s suppressed disinterest in biographical details that won’t be part of her performance playbook; Haynes and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt outdo themselves in a couple of scenes—one in a restaurant, one in a shop where Mary in trying on graduation gowns—in which they employ mirrors to draw a knife-edge divide between the two.  And though Elizabeth might believe that she’s found a slam dunk in Georgie, a wild-eyed singer in a local band who offers to tell all, for a price, it turns out in the end that his belief that Gracie ruined his life is shakier than it seems.

But while Portman and Moore undoubtedly dominate the film, Melton’s turn as a man hobbled by undefinable longings and insecurity is no less impressive.  His quiet, diffident manner suggests that the child he was when he and Gracie first met is still there in his thirty-six year old body, and a rooftop conversation with Charlie reinforces the idea.  The supporting cast excels as well, all contributing to a situation that comes across as pervasively uncomfortable for everyone.                      

As is usual in Haynes’s films, “May December” is carefully wrought in technical terms, with Sam Lisenco’s production design and April Napier’s costumes unobtrusively right, as is Affonso Gonçalves’ smooth, unhurried editing.  By adapting Michel Legrand’s music for Joseph Losey’s “The Go-Between,” Marcelo Zarvos’ score emphasizes the roots of the film in the classical melodramas to which the writer-director paid homage in his remarkable “Far From Heaven” back in 2002.  If the new film doesn’t quite match that earlier one, it comes very close.   

Producers: Mark Johnson, Bill Block, David Hemingson   Director: Alexander Payne   Screenplay: David Hemingson   Cast: Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Carrie Preston, Andrew Garman, Brady Hepner, Michael Provost, Ian Dolley, Jim Kaplan, Naheem Garcia, Stephen Thorne, Darby Lee-Stack, Juanita Pearl, Tate Donovan and Gillian Vigman   Distributor: Focus Features     

Grade: A-

From “Citizen Ruth” in 1996 through “Nebraska” in 2013, Alexander Payne directed a remarkable series of intimate comedy-dramas of uncommon humor and pathos.  He stumbled somewhat in 2017 with the larger-scaled “Downsizing,” but regains his footing with this winning period piece about a curmudgeonly prep school teacher who proves in the end to have just a smidgen of Mr. Chipping in his soul.  “The Holdovers” also reunites Payne with Paul Giamatti, the star of one of his best, “Sideways.”

Giamatti is Paul Hunham, a teacher of ancient history at Barton Academy, a posh Massachusetts boys’ prep school.  He’s brutally caustic with his students, whom he sees as over-pampered, unserious paragons of privilege and berates for their poor performance and elitist attitudes.  The time is December, 1970, when the holiday break is scheduled to begin, but he’s not about to let up in his demands on them, causing a spike in their already hostile attitude, which they gleefully express by deriding his physical problems—an ocular disorder that’s earned him the nickname “Walleye” and a condition that gives off a strong odor of fish.

Nor is Paul a favorite of Headmaster Woodrup (Andrew Garman), an erstwhile student of his, who blames him for his strict treatment of a senator’s son and its negative impact on the school’s endowment.  He jumps at the chance to saddle Hunham with the duty of babysitting the four boys who, for whatever reason, have to stay on campus over the break.  At the last minute a fifth is added: Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a smart but snarky young man whom Hunham considers one of his class reprobates, and who’s furious that his recently remarried mother has obviously capitulated to her moneyed new husband to keep him away.

The setup seems designed for a prolonged battle between Hunham, who intends to have the boys study as though he were leading detention, and his passel of charges, two of whom—Tully and frat-boy type Teddy Kuntze (Brady Hepner)—detest one another almost as much as they do the teacher.  But scripter David Hemingson throws a bit of a curve when four of the students—including the two youngest (Ian Dolley and Jim Kaplan), Kuntze and good-natured jock Jason Smith (Michael Provost)—are spirited off for a skiing trip in a helicopter by Smith’s father, leaving only Angus, whose parents couldn’t be reached to give their permission, behind with Paul and the only other two people on campus—cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and janitor Danny (Naheem Garcia), who’s considerate of her feelings; Mary’s still in grief over the death of her son Curtis, a Barton grad who was killed in Vietnam.   

There’s a natural sympathy between Hunham, who’s sensitive to issues of class and privilege, and Lamb; he reacts with real anger when Kuntze disparages her during a dinner before his departure.  (They also share a taste for alcohol.)  But an accommodation between Paul and Angus is much slower to gestate.  It comes gradually, when the teacher must take the student into town for medical care after he injures himself, or they go to a Christmas party thrown by Woodrup’s considerate secretary Lydia Crane (Carrie Preston), or to a local diner.  It finally blossoms when Tully persuades Hunham that a “field trip” to Boston would not be out of the question; they even invite Mary along, dropping her off along the way to visit her pregnant sister Peggy (Juanita Pearl).

But it’s their stay in the city that proves decisive in coming to a mutual understanding.  They do some pretty ordinary things, like going to see “Little Big Man,” but in the course of their jaunt each reveals events from their pasts that explain in great measure why they are as they are.  It’s one encounter in particular, with a troubled man played by Stephen Thorne, that leads to a crisis back on campus, where Tully’s mother (Gillian Vigman) and stepfather (Tate Donovan) threaten to remove him from Barton and send him to a military school, and Hunham must decide whether or not to intervene and put himself on the spot.

Like its characters, “The Holdovers” meanders somewhat.  The script, for example, raises some romantic possibilities, for Paul with Lydia and for Angus with Lydia’s niece Elise (Darby Lee-Stack), but quickly sets them aside.  There are occasional nods to the controversy about the continuing war, as in an encounter Angus has with a couple of patrons at the diner (as well as the looming fact of Curtis’ death, and the well-to-do students’ apparent lack of worry about being called to serve), but it’s never directly addressed.  And there are times when Kevin Tent’s editing feels a mite slack (the film runs well over two hours).

But in a way one comes to appreciate Payne’s unhurried approach, which gives the picture the feel of one actually made in the 1970s, a vibe accentuated in Ryan Warren Smith’s production design, Wendy Chuck’s costumes, and Eigil Bryld’s cinematography of the snowy locations—actually in Massachusetts, not Canada.  That’s quite deliberate on Payne’s part: his aesthetic choices reflect the films of that period.  Martin Orton’s supple score, with traditional Christmas songs added to the mix, does likewise. 

Of course Payne’s deft touch with actors is a primary factor in the film’s success.  Giamatti delivers a bracingly funny and poignant portrait of a man who conceals the wrongs he’s endured with strident exhibitions of learning mixed with sarcasm and disdain, and newcomer Sessa matches him as a young man with similar coping mechanisms.  Randolph, meanwhile, adds a wealth of warmth and resilience to the mix as a woman of practical bent struggling to deal with losses that, as Hunham angrily tells his stunned students, they can’t even begin to comprehend.  Together the three present a memorable joint portrait of damaged characters who learn to lean on one another.  The supporting cast is spot-on down the line.

“The Holdovers” can be thought of as Payne’s response to people who complain that they don’t make movies the way they used to.  But while it will call to mind prep school classics of decades ago, its prickly, bittersweet approach sidesteps the bathos into which they were inclined to fall even as, in the end, it doesn’t fail to satisfy a viewer’s yearning for an upbeat outcome, however backhanded.  This is a funny, insightful film, deeply humane and ultimately quite touching.