"May December" Review: The Real Oscars Snub

Forget "Barbie", Todd Haynes' impeccable drama is this year's Oscars tragedy.

February 13, 2024

In the summer of 1996, 34-year-old school teacher Mary Kay Letourneau coerced her 12-year-old student Vili Fualaau into an inappropriate sexual relationship. In July, police caught the two in a parked car. Letourneau claimed that Fualaau was a family friend who witnessed an argument between her and her husband and fled; she was only searching for him: in other words, protecting him.

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It’s ironic but also gives insight into the minds of child sex predators. Letourneau, despite having stolen Fualaau's innocence and sexually corrupted him, immediately assigned herself the protector role in her account. It’s in the vein of the same warped perspective we’ve heard before: they aren’t hurting children, they’re helping them; they aren’t violating children, but liberating them; we’re wrong, they’re right.

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Letourneau ultimately conceded and pleaded guilty to two counts of child rape. As part of her plea agreement, she agreed to a no-contact order and served only six months in prison, during which her first child with Fualaau was born.

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When Letourneau was released, she sought out Fualaau, with whom she was caught in a car again on February 8, 1998; inside the vehicle were baby clothes, Letourneau’s passport, and $6,200 in cash. A judge revoked the plea agreement and sentenced her to 7 ½ years in prison, during which time her second child by Fualaau was born. Letourneau’s time in prison included a six-month stint in solitary confinement when letters she’d written to Fualaau got intercepted by prison personnel.

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Fualaau struggled with suicidal ideation and alcoholism throughout his adolescence and ultimately attempted suicide in March 1999. Still, when Letourneau's sentence ended in 2004, he convinced a judge to reverse the no-contact order so they could be together: the pair married on May 20, 2005.

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The resulting tabloid scandal from this twisted “love affair” proved many things. It proved that predators are relentless monsters who will stop at nothing to seize the object of their “affection.” It proved that the damage they inflict drapes a thick fog over their victims' lives and creates a corrosive attachment from which there is little hope for escape.

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It also proved that “love” does not conquer all. Despite their 12-year marriage, the public never embraced their story, absolving Letourneau on the basis that, after all that time, maybe it was love.

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We knew what it really was and how it happened, and we weren't going to condone or validate it. Letourneau was a deviant and a predator; she lived that way, “loved” that way, and on July 6, 2020, died that way.

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May December, the movie based on Fualaau and Letourneau’s story, assigns itself a difficult task. Instead of playing it safe with outright condemnation, leaning into Letourneau’s sordid tale of predation, it attempts to hit harder at the extent of its deprivation with dark comedy.

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Elizabeth Berry is an actress cast to play a fictionalized version of Gracie Atherton-Yoo, Letourneau’s cinematic equivalent, a woman who, when in her mid-30s, seduced a 13-year-old boy. The boy and now husband, Joe, was her son’s friend and an employee at the pet store she worked at, but one day, in the store’s stock room, she forced him to become much more.

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Elizabeth's arrival is met with much fanfare as the townspeople marvel at the celebrity in their midst, but Gracie is trepidatious. Their initial conversations are surface-level but soon expose both women’s predatory instincts. As Elizabeth learns the sordid details of Gracie and Joe’s union, she becomes enamored, crossing from method actor to wannabe Gracie. Meanwhile, Gracie slowly recognizes how badly Elizabeth wants to embody her entirely because she carries that same desperation with her every waking moment. It may manifest differently, but the victim is consistent.

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Thus, we slowly watch Joe realize he was robbed of a normal adolescence as he sees his children experience what he never did. The turmoil and torment on his face are palpable in every moment, whether he exchanges a heart-to-heart with his son on their roof as he tries marijuana for the first time or stands across from the seductive actress fetishizing his victimization.

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Every step, even if a seeming move in the right direction, is a painful retreat into the vicious cycle that’s destroyed his life. As he finally succumbs to the mutual attraction with Elizabeth, we see him become a nervous teenager again: sweaty, fumbling, and quick to release. He’s spent his life with an older woman, but her immaturity has stifled his growth.

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Ironically, despite the controversy surrounding the film’s approach to its subject matter, that approach relays the horror of the Letourneau-Fualaau saga. As Elizabeth becomes more obsessed with recreating the couple’s treasured moments, insisting on time alone in the stock room where Gracie raped Joe, the very moment that represented the extent of her predation and began the public turmoil that further robbed Joe of his youth, we reflect on how easily it is for us to view such figures with perverse fascination and mockery.

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Director Todd Haynes’ Lifetime movie approach to the scene, where Elizabeth dramatically moves about the stock room stairs, caresses her neck, and softly pants to a ludicrous musical backdrop, instills a greater sense of lunacy than the story itself. We understand the horror of Gracie’s actions, but the immaturity necessary to pursue a 13-year-old boy is plainest when the movie shows the ridiculousness of that mindset. It’s like something plucked from the twisted fantasy world of a deranged, repressed housewife, something befitting the soapy treatment the film gives it.

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It ultimately makes unraveling Joe and Gracie’s life together all the more frustrating. The typicality of the pair’s marital disputes is not foreign to us; we’ve countless times heard the excuses child abusers make to absolve themselves, blaming the victim and claiming they got exploited, but after how well the film displays Gracie’s ethical bankruptcy and Joe’s tortured loss of innocence, watching him try, for once, to make her truly listen to him only for her to dismiss his feelings and blame him, is infuriating.

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We don’t merely shake our heads in disgust or roll our eyes in frustration, because Gracie’s blaming on this sensitive, wounded man she’s stolen from himself is unnecessary. She could easily say that what happened between them was an inevitable culmination of their irrepressible passion, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t absorb the emotions he blatantly struggles to let out. As he beats around the bush, trying to find the words, she launches her preemptive strike; as steadfastly as she's defended their marriage, she’s known this has been coming for years. As she displaces blame, she accepts it by acknowledging that this moment, when Joe takes the reins and demands to be heard, was the actual inevitability.

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Yet, she still seems shocked. She jabs as Joe's wife but lulls him into a false sense of security as his mother, which, in the most disturbing sense imaginable, she’s been for the last 23 years. She pinballs between righteous indignation, expert word-twisting, and strict disciplinarian, staring down her opponent as she fires pointed questions about responsibility to which she knows the true answer.

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It’s heartbreaking to watch Joe move like a zombie, stripped of his individuality and resigned to a life he slowly realizes he didn’t agree to live. He never got to learn the lessons his peers used to grow and develop a view of life and the world in which we live it. Joe only had Gracie to rely on, to teach him, to guide him, and she exploited that power and enslaved him to her for life.

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We watch him handle these new stimuli the only way he can: like a kid. Elizabeth’s intentions are clear, but to Joe, they are only an indication that maybe, just maybe, someone could genuinely like him; he tries to impart wisdom to his son on the roof but cannot vocalize a coherent thought because, when push comes to shove, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about; Gracie’s blame displacement is an obvious tactic to absolve herself and keep Joe in line, but for Joe the entire conversation, even if he doesn’t wholly realize it, is a scared, confused child learning to discuss his feelings with someone incapable of caring about them.

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Alas, we know this because the real-life story made that abundantly clear; all May December can do is show an old way to dissect an old story and in a way that could allow us to perceive it from a different angle, one that could illuminate it further. The darkly comic approach will dispel many, but it displays the importance of expanding our horizons, challenging our sensibilities, and giving movies a chance to show different ways of examining a premise.

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May December’s perspective on its subject matter prioritizes the parallel between our handling of tragedy and the campy melodrama with which Elizabeth infests Gracie and Joe’s lives. It exposes the immaturity necessary to consume these unfortunate slices of life with such wonderment while making it equal to the immaturity needed for people like Gracie and Mary Kay Letourneau to serve them to us in the first place. Elizabeth departs her final conversation with Gracie, where the latter throws her son under the bus to defend her self-proclaimed security, with shock, oblivious to the corruption she’s undertaken in consuming the very life she feels so audacious, just as we depart our deep dives into others’ depravity with a clear conscience and zero self-awareness.

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May December wants to show us that we haven’t run out of ways to analyze human behavior and attempt to resolve that which destroys people like Vili and Joe. At that, it soundly succeeds.