Todd Haynes Plays the Superego

The director is interested in people constrained by society's rules. In his latest, he makes it harder to root for the rule-breakers.

- Madeline Leung Coleman

TODD HAYNES HAS spent much of his career making films about people who struggle to express even the most basic emotional need. Sometimes the web they're stuck in is one they have spun themselves, a filigree of delusion and self-protective lies. Other times, they fear society's judgment. In his best films-the thwarted lust and romance of Poison, Far From Heaven, and Carol; the suburban rot of Safeit's both. His new movie, May December, follows a famous actress named Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) who travels to Tybee Island, Georgia, to meet the notorious woman she's about to play in a biopic: Gracie (Julianne Moore), who filled the tabloids 20-odd years ago after she seduced, and got pregnant by, a middle-school boy named Joe. Now that boy is a man (Charles Melton), and he and Gracie are still together and raising their own nearly grown children. The intrusion of Portman's glamorous outsider makes Joe question what he had forced himself to accept about his lifebut in classic Haynes style, that's no guarantee he'll break free.

I noticed something rewatching your films: You've shot a lot of scenes of disapproving townspeople gawking at the protagonist for doing something transgressive. You've also got a lot of scenes where people are gawking at someone because they're famous. May December has both.

Those are almost invariably nods to similar shots in Fassbinder melodramas where he separates protagonists who are put into a fraught situation with the mores of the culture. In May December, looks in general are a motif throughout, along with which characters have access to seeing things. Natalie Portman's character, Elizabeth, is an actor, somebody whom people look at and project onto. At first, we presume she's going to be our view into this story, but she's hardly the anonymous, objective reporter in the dark.

Is this the first movie you've ever made about filmmaking?