May December ***1/2

 

REVIEW:

Surprisingly, this is a hell of a movie. The trailer doesn’t do it justice, and the all-star dynamic duo of Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, are great, but it’s the story that really brings this one to life. It’s a deep and eery movie with sharp writing. This is the story of an actress who comes to town to study the character she will be playing in a movie. That character is a woman who slept with a kid when he was just thirteen years old, and then continued to have an affair with him over the years. This movie very cleverly doesn’t go back to that time, but instead imagines what the life is like for those characters twenty years after the fact. It shows us what the ramifications were from that situation, and what their children’s lives are like. Not only are Portman and Moore great, but so is the actor who plays Joe, the guy who seems to be just realizing for the first time that he was the real victim in what happened. Natalie Portman is so good at choosing these deep, dark roles, just like she did with Black Swan, and brining them to life. And Moore is actually scary, as the character who you know you can’t trust, and who seems to have a secret agenda, What a great, creepy movie.