Not your average lady of the house
Near the beginning of Todd Haynes’ new film, “May December,” there’s a moment that has become the subject of fascination. Julianne Moore’s Gracie Atherton-yoo is preparing for a barbecue. She tells her teenage twins to be careful as they head to the rooftop with friends, and then she goes to the fridge. The music swells. A look of fear crosses her face: “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs.”
It’s certainly a funny beat, but it’s also one that taps into themes that Haynes has been exploring and subverting with Moore for nearly 30 years: the construct of the perfect American suburban housewife. Gracie’s expression indicates something is indeed terribly wrong, but it’s just the thin notion that her day might not go as planned. The worst thing that could happen is that there might not be enough hot dogs. (The next cut reveals there are plenty of hot dogs.)
But Gracie is, of course, no ordinary housewife. She’s married to Joe (Charles Melton), who was just 13 when they began the relationship that would send her to prison, where she gave birth to their first child. And yet the life she has built for herself is, on the surface, idyllic. She has a house by the water. She bakes cakes and hosts parties. If not for the circumstances of how she and her husband got together, she would seem the ideal wife and mother. Or would she?
Since Haynes’ first collaboration with Moore, on “Safe” (1995), the two have worked together to dig into his — and America’s — preoccupation with the housewife archetype. But these women, as Haynes envisions them and as Moore portrays them, are never quite what they seem, and their movies chip away at notions of domestic femininity that the characters at first hold dear.
Each film — “Safe,” “Far From Heaven” (2002) and now “May December” — opens with a Moore housewife living contentedly in carefully curated spaces. Then we watch as her views are challenged by outside
forces that pollute the havens she has created. Together, Haynes and Moore probe the psyches of women who are so often dismissed as a sunny June Cleaver from “Leave It to Beaver” type, there to serve and do little else.
In different films, these characters might be treated as window dressing. Cinema history is littered with overlooked spouses, but Moore and Haynes instead analyze them. Moore’s knack for playing fragility gives these ladies a disarmingly porcelain quality that we watch get shattered.
In “Safe,” Moore is Carol, a wife and stepmother living in the San Fernando Valley in 1987. Her days are filled with little tasks — gardening, going to the gym — and initially the biggest disruption seems to involve the couch she and her husband have ordered arriving in the wrong color. The moment of that realization anticipates Moore’s hot dog exclamation in “May December.” She stops in her tracks and exclaims, “Oh, my God!” with a look of utter dismay as if this were a terrible tragedy.
But then Carol grows sick, and she begins to suspect that it’s the modern world that is poisoning her. Her illness means she can no longer go about her routine of easy socializing with other women in her sphere.
At a baby shower full of minor pleasantries, a friend’s child is sitting on her lap when she has an attack. The others at the party notice her gasping for air, but they are slow to go to her side. Haynes holds her in a frame all alone for a beat as the camera closes in on her face in a state of sheer distress and the ominous score by Ed Tomney hums.
Haynes once explained to The Film Stage that with the movie, he “wanted your own narrative expectations to first drive this woman out of a certain kind of oppression, and then ultimately drive her back into it.” At the end, Carol is still
sheltered, but not like she used to be; she’s sheltered in a completely different, arguably even more unnerving way. She has broken free from her housewife existence; however, she has locked herself up. She loves herself, but at what cost?
The same can be said of Moore’s Cathy Whitaker in “Far From Heaven,” Haynes’ homage to the melodramas of Douglas Sirk set in the 1950s. Cathy — a demure presence who uses words like “jiminy” — is so practiced at her role as a devoted housewife that in one of her early scenes she is being interviewed for a local gazette
as a model for other women “with families and home to keep up.” But as she’s talking to the reporter she notices something that shakes her: a Black man walking through her yard. His presence is alien in the fall Connecticut foliage. She softens when she hears that he is Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert), the son of her late gardener.
Raymond’s arrival coincides with another revelation for Cathy. Late one night she decides to bring dinner to her husband, Frank ( Dennis Quaid), in his office, dutifully fulfilling her role as a caretaker. She finds him kissing another man. As she wrestles with her husband’s homosexuality, she starts to feel like an outlier among her crowd. That feeling becomes manifest when she starts to associate publicly with Raymond, breaking the neighborhood’s taboo of friendship with a Black person. She speaks to him at an art exhibition, drawing sneering glances from her peers. It’s a scene that in some ways echoes the baby shower in “Safe.” We can see how Cathy becomes unusual to the other women around her, except in this case she finds human connection she never knew she needed.
On the surface, Gracie from “May December” has much in common with Carol and Cathy: her desire for her home to be beautiful; her distinctive, childlike way of speaking. And yet Gracie differs from her fellow heroines and not simply because she’s the only one of the Moore heroines not written by Haynes; the movie’s screenplay is by Samy Burch. From the outset we know there’s a rot inside Gracie. It’s not her environment that’s a plague: It’s Gracie herself.
The plot is set in motion by the arrival of an actress, Elizabeth ( Natalie Portman), who wants to study Gracie to play her in an independent film. But while Elizabeth stirs up latent emotions in Joe, Gracie resolutely maintains the blinders she has put on that allow her to live an ostensibly normal, guilt-free life despite her crimes. In the middle of an awkward family dinner at a restaurant, after Gracie’s older children from her previous marriage arrive, she encounters Elizabeth in the bathroom. Elizabeth asks her what her expectations were for the evening.
“That tonight would go well, that my children would love me and my life would be perfect,” Gracie explains. Elizabeth suggests that perspective is naive, to which Gracie responds, “I am naive. I always have been. In a way, it’s been a gift.”
Carol and Cathy are tempted to venture beyond their confines, but Gracie takes solace in hers. She’s an American monster who uses the stereotype of the good housewife to live with the evil she has committed.