This month Verve’s star teen reviewer Lucy Kennedy mulls over the controversial May December.
May December
Rated M
Directed by Todd Haynes
The year is 1992. Thirteen-year-old Joe starts working after school in a pet shop and soon begins sexual relations with his co-worker, Gracie. Gracie is 36. And married, with three children. This was the case that the world knew about: a near-40-year-old woman, sexually abusing a boy who was barely a teenager. Now, it’s 2015, and Joe and Gracie are married, with have kids of their own. Elizabeth Berry, an actress, is playing the role of Gracie in an upcoming film. She slips behind the sunny, rose-tinted exterior of their relationship, and studies the complicated, uncomfortable, and at times disturbing life they have built together. Elizabeth studies Gracie, trying anything she can to inhabit this person who has done the unthinkable and fractured the lives of those around her in the process. Joe is inextricably ensnared in a life with his abuser. Gracie has deluded herself into believing that she has done nothing wrong, maintaining throughout the film that Joe seduced her, despite him being, at the time, a child, and her, an educated adult.
This film is an in-depth examination of the consequences of Gracie’s choice to fracture her life for an illegal and abusive affair. A convoluted, twisted story that is repulsively compelling and will leave you both aghast and amazed. Being based on the true crime of the Mary Kay Letourneau case adds another element of morbid fascination to the story. The film’s inescapable, overarching question is: “Who could do such a thing?” You’ll certainly be asking yourself the same question for days after watching.
3/5 stars
Available in cinemas and paid streaming online
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