May December PEOPLE Review: Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman Face Off in an Unsettling Comedy

Director Todd Haynes's new film is a brilliantly performed riff on the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal.

May December is like a Lifetime movie that’s fallen into enemy hands.

The crude, voyeuristic, maybe sanctimonious pleasure you might find watching, say, Amish Stud: The Eli Weaver Story — the sense that you’ve lifted a rock to take a gander at the slugs and bugs beneath — gives way to something that’s more troubling and elusive, but also a lot funnier. May December will entertain you while getting under your skin.

Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), an actress known for playing a veterinarian on a TV series called Norah’s Ark, hungers after the great dramatic roles — the Medeas, the Hedda Gablers, women who bring society’s disapproval down on their defiant heads. For now, she’s going to star in a movie about the notorious Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore).

Several decades before, Gracie was chum in the jaws of the tabloids: A 36-year-old wife and mom, she had a sexual relationship with Joe, a seventh grader. (They worked together at a pet store.) Pregnant with their child when she went to prison, Gracie later married Joe and, despite the 23-year age difference between them, has resumed her life as a suburban homemaker. It’s as if a tsunami had swept through Gracie's life, uprooting everything — her first marriage, her reputation, Joe's childhood — yet after the waters receded she was left standing in exactly the same spot.

This setup puts May December in what just about anyone will recognize as Mary Kay Letourneau territory, only here it's spun in a strange new direction by director Todd Haynes (Safe, Far from Heaven). With his talent for gently provoking discomfort — it's a sneakiness, almost — Haynes doesn’t so much explore relationships as analyze different forms of interpersonal toxicity.

Perhaps hoping to signal to the world just how ordinary her life has become, Gracie allows Elizabeth to spend time with her as research for the role. The two take a flower-arranging class and spend time in the kitchen — Gracie runs her own little side business baking cakes and pies. Early on, however, she's forced to make a swift, disturbing pivot when a box of feces, sent by an anonymous hater, arrives at the house while Elizabeth is visiting. Well, a box of feces isn't that big a deal, Gracie explains— she receives far fewer than she used to.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

You don’t for a second believe that Gracie could be so blasé, but you understand why she wouldn’t dwell on it with Elizabeth. Much more mysterious is a moment later in the movie, when Joe (Riverdale's Charles Melton) comes home to find Gracie alone in the bedroom, wracked with sobs — one of her dessert clients is leaving town and canceling any future orders. She acts as if someone had died.

This odd, sad little scene feels as close as you're ever going to get to Gracie's oblique heart — the movie doesn't offer many more such glimpses, and even so they don't necessarily create a sense of empathy. Gracie has a rather cruel habit of telling her teenage daughter that her arms are too fat. But this is why May December so fascinating and also so confounding: Like Elizabeth, the movie is trying to approach a woman who's been branded — not incorrectly — as morally and sexually transgressive. (Gracie is the insect beneath the rock.) Instead she's revealed to be someone who falls apart over cakes and fat-shames her kid. She remains unnervingly alien.

You could say that Haynes lets you draw your own conclusions. It may be that what Gracie is sobbing about isn't cakes but the path her life has taken — perhaps, as was Letourneau, she's overwhelmed by remorse and regret. But this isn't Anatomy of a Fall, the extraordinary French film that leaves audiences debating over the guilt of a woman accused of killing her husband. It's more accurate to say that Haynes prevents you from drawing any conclusion at all.

From time to time he disorients you even more with a flourish of camp excess, courtesy of Marcelo Zarvos's score: Why should there be an orchestral blast on the soundtrack when Gracie opens the refrigerator door and announces, “I don't think we have enough hotdogs”? You’d have to ask Haynes. But he might not know, either.

With Gracie’s acquiescence, Elizabeth proceeds to interview those who’ve known her, although Gracie resents not being told in advance when the interviewees include Gracie’s first husband. With a delicate false front of politeness and tact, Elizabeth goes about disassembling Gracie’s bland surface reality. Portman generates most of May December’s comedy with a performance that suggests small feints of common human feeling, along with an underlying ruthlessness or perhaps, like Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, a carelessness that’s close to contempt. At times she looks like the tinier sister of Scandal’s Madeleine Stowe.

Elizabeth, who's capable of being transgressive herself, manages to seduce and destabilize Joe, who begins to articulate aloud just how uncomfortable he’s been in the role of Grace's significant other since seventh grade. As played with exceptional sensitivity by Merton, Joe is a quietly heartbreaking figure, a man-child suddenly imagining the man he might have been and probably will never be. Him we understand.

Gracie, on the other hand, is floored when Joe suggests that she initiated the relationship all those years ago in the pet store — no, she counters, he was the one in control.

Can Gracie possibly see the past this way? Her endless inscrutability — the prickly ambiguity nesting in virtually everything she says — is the core of Moore’s extraordinary performance. It's hard to think of another actress who can inhabit a role so fully and yet seem so curiously absent. She plays Gracie with the purity of a holy fool.

Related: May December Director Says Charles Melton Gained 40 Lbs. for Movie Because His 'Hunkiness' Didn't Fit Role

In that regard, it's tempting to note that “Gracie” is a close rhyme with crazy. But what would that prove? "Gracie" also suggests grace.

Portman’s Elizabeth can’t begin to grasp this profoundly unknowable woman. Just how woefully her imagination falls short is made clear when, at the end, she's filming a key scene from her “Gracie” film: Elizabeth is a lousy actress. The unanswerable question is whether she realizes that.

Gracie, on the other hand, may have a glimmer of insight into this interloper's game. “I am naive,” Gracie tells Elizabeth. “I always have been. In a way, it’s been a gift.” This is a kiss-off and, in its peculiar note of pride, not all that different from Medea’s farewell to her husband after butchering their kids: “You have gambled and lost.”

May December is available to stream on Netflix Dec. 1.

For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!

Read the original article on People.