![]() ![]() (The terms of their arrangement, including any financial compensation, are never made clear.)įor a movie that’s very much about different shades of transgression, Elizabeth goes about her research with a blithe indifference to boundaries. Elizabeth is set to play Gracie in an independent movie, and the Yoos, who can only hope for a sympathetic depiction, have agreed to let her spend a few days in their company. The arrival of Elizabeth Berry (a superb Natalie Portman), a well-known TV actor eyeing a career bump, offers still more proof of the couple’s lasting notoriety. ![]() Still, given the boxes of feces that sometimes land on their doorstep, their convention-defying union still has the power to provoke public loathing and fascination two decades later. As local kids laugh and play and hot dogs sizzle on the grill, the Yoos appear to have settled into the affection and occasional tedium of a happy marriage. The unease springs, in part, from the patina of middle-class normalcy that clings to Gracie and Joe from the moment we first see them preparing for a backyard BBQ. Years later, after Letourneau’s release, the two wed and stayed married until their separation 14 years later Letourneau died of cancer in 2020.Īlthough Samy Burch’s sharply layered script (drawn from a story she co-wrote with Alex Mechanik) never directly invokes Letourneau and Fualaau, it brings us into uncomfortable intimacy with two characters whose real-life inspiration is never in doubt. ![]() What happened next - a headline-grabbing scandal, a child-rape trial, a baby born in prison - cleaves in broad outline to the case of Mary Kay Letourneau, a Washington schoolteacher who, in 1997, was convicted of sexually abusing her sixth-grade student Vili Fualaau. Time has largely dulled the air of moral outrage and salacious gossip that once swirled around the couple, whose relationship began when Joe was barely a teenager. That certainly includes the insects’ 36-year-old owner, Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), and his 59-year-old wife, Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), who have three college-age kids and live in Savannah, Ga. But they are also reminders of an insect life cycle with its own biological cadence, governed by strictly timed rituals of growth, mating and reproduction that the rest of us don’t always have to follow. Raised in a small enclosure, at least during their larval stage, they offer a ready metaphor for entrapment, inhabiting a hothouse environment that exists for the stimulation of anyone who peers inside. The monarch butterflies we see in the opening moments of “May December,” like everything else in Todd Haynes’ dark and disquietingly funny new movie, invite more than one interpretation. ![]()
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