NETFLIX: May December
There’s a 17th century Jacobean drama by Thomas Middleton, and as I watched Todd Haynes’ Netflix film May December, the play’s title kept chiming through my mind: Women Beware Women. Though I don’t think that’s the moral Haynes — working from Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik’s script — had in mind. At the end, though, I wasn’t really sure what the movie’s point was.
Based loosely on the story of Mary Kay Letourneau, the schoolteacher who had sex, bore a child with then married one of her sixth-grade students, May December unfolds in Savannah (refreshingly shown as a place people live rather than a nonstop tourism roulette). At a sunny backyard party overlooking the tidewater, TV actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) introduces herself to the Atherton-Yoo family and proceeds to infiltrate/investigate their lives for weeks. She’s been cast to play the mother of the family, Gracie (Haynes stalwart Julianne Moore), in a movie about her life.
At first glance a typical mom with a cake-baking business and a side hustle in floral arrangements, Gracie still gets regular, anonymous dog poo deliveries to their home, thanks to the lingering scandal of seducing a teen named Joe years ago. Now 36 and the father of their three teen and college-age kids, Joe has turned into a stable fellow (played nicely by Charles Melton), whose hobby (metaphor alert!) is nurturing monarch butterflies from chrysalis to first flight.
Though he spends a lot of time babying his much older wife, both spouses have moments when they show signs of arrested development, though Joe has more legitimate cause. Meanwhile, both Gracie and Elizabeth act out not-so-subtle moments of control, manipulation or cluelessness. Visiting a drama class at the Atherton-Yoo twins’ high school, Elizabeth is asked what it’s like to act out a sex scene on camera. Her answer is almost as inappropriately judged as Gracie’s seduction of the 13-year-old Joe. Later on, she’ll plow across even more boundaries.
At its best, May December circles on the mystery of any couple seen from the outside. Are they really happy? At what cost does their apparent domestic contentment come? At its wobbliest, the movie traffics in clichés: female actors as emotionally unfixed and dangerous; wives as manipulative and needy. Both Gracie and Elizabeth play-act to get what they want, which gives the movie a stale whiff of misogyny. It’s not what you expect from Haynes, maker of Safe, Carol and Far from Heaven, movies centered on women struggling to find power and identity in oppressive societies.
In the end, May December offers neither the campy juice you get from those ripped-from-the-headlines TV movies it mocks or the depths of a psychological art film like Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. It feels like an early draft of the idea that first drew Haynes to the material.
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NETFLIX: Nyad
In the movie named for her, Diana Nyad comes off as an egotistical monster, the kind of narcissist you’d love not to run into at a party. That’s partly the secret to the success behind Nyad, which doesn’t shy away from the athlete’s self-aggrandizing cluelessness and her inability to read a room. The movie shows that this kind of selfish focus is the kind that gets results.
Annette Bening — four-time Oscar nominee without ever winning the award — plays Nyad, paired with Jodie Foster (who took home Academy gold twice herself) as one-time girlfriend Bonnie Stoll. Diana taps Bonnie to be her trainer when she decides, in her 60s, to try to swim from Cuba to Florida. She failed in the attempt years ago when she was only 28, so the odds seem badly stacked against her. But the Gulf Stream, lethal jellyfish and gale force winds don’t stand a chance against an ego like Diana’s.
Nyad is a standard procedural, showing us the athlete’s multiple tries to swim her way into the history books. It’s a resolutely boomer flick, for better and worse. Diana’s self-focused drive (raging that “she’s stealing my swim!” when a younger athlete attempts the same feat) might encapsulate the post-WWII generation’s me-first aesthetic. On the soundtrack, Simon & Garfunkel; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; and Neil Young honey-glaze the nostalgia.
Spouses Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi direct. They were previously known for documentaries, especially their Oscar-winning Free Solo. With their first try at a feature, they seem to know what they’re doing. It could be argued that all they really had to do was stay out of the way.
Like the athletes they represent, Bening and Foster are the sort of career pros you just sit back and admire as they nail their scenes. Even if you’ve never lowered a toe into the ocean, Bening and Foster keep you riveted. There’s also a self-effacing turn by Rhys Ifans as the navigator who enables Nyad’s success. Like the man he plays, Ifans’ contribution could be overlooked. It shouldn’t be.
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NETFLIX: The Killer
After his overpraised Hollywood bio-dud Mank in 2020, director David Fincher comes back to Netflix for another original film. The Killer is lean and mean, fitting nicely with Fincher’s sleek, chilly aesthetic but resulting in a procedural thriller that’s proudly uninterested in thrills. It has a massive, house-leveling fight scene, but dramatically it doesn’t really develop a pulse until its final minutes.
That’s when Tilda Swinton turns up as a sophisticated professional assassin who’s been hired to kill a hit man colleague — the same fellow who’s been boring us stupid for the movie’s first 90 minutes. Unfortunately, that’s the central character, played by Michael Fassbender and identified only as The Killer. Swinton’s handle is The Expert, and she’s behind attempts to kill The Killer after he botches, yes, a kill in Paris.
Given the simple premise, you may not be surprised that the film is based on a graphic novel. Still, there are tons of good movies made from graphic novels/animes — Persepolis, Snowpiercer, A History of Violence, Battle Royale and on and on. This one is propelled by a voice-over monologue delivered by Fassbender that utterly never stops. “Popeye the Sailor probably said it best,” he opines. “I am what I am. I’m not exceptional; I’m just a part. Consider yourself lucky if our paths never cross.” (Too late!) “Avoid being memorable,” he also advises. Other than the ugly bucket hats and sitcom character names he uses as his aliases, he sticks to his mantra.
The Killer’s nonstop voice-over is the kind you imagine rattles around in the heads of incels and other delusional males as they plot revenge on a world that (rightly) views them as losers. It’s a limp-sausage fantasy packed with weapons that always stay hard.
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NETFLIX: Bodies
It’s been around a while, so you may have already sunk into the sci-fi pleasures of Bodies. There are worse ways to spend eight episodes. Initially set in three timelines, the England-based story unfurls in the years 1890, 1941 and 2023. Each plotline centers on an inspector trying to identify a nude body discovered lying in Longharvest Lane in the Whitechapel district of London (Don’t get excited by the locale; Jack the Ripper does not put in an appearance).
In the Victorian age, the bobby on the job is Hillinghead (Kyle Soller), a married father whose investigation and family life get sidetracked by his dare-not-speak-its-name love affair with a journalist (George Parker). In 1941, the cop is Whiteman (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), a happily corrupt fellow not above murder to advance his career, who finds himself on a course toward redemption. And in 2023, single mother and inspector Hasan (Amaka Okafor) is on the case of the Longharvest corpse.
Here’s the catch: Across those three centuries, it’s the same John Doe. How can that be? And why does the phrase “You will be loved” ring across all three investigations? And who is that bloke who shows up in all the eras, looking like Stephen Graham but speaking in posh tones rather than the working-class Lancashire accent the actor’s known for?
Things become clearer (“clearer” being relative in yarns like this) when Bodies introduces a fourth timeline: 2053, where our assigned detective is Maplewood (Shira Haas of Unorthodox). If you can ignore the inevitable time-space paradoxes that snag most stories in the genre, you’ll have a good time — even if the depictions of the different eras are dragged down by cliché. Did everyone during WWII meet in the pub and sing “We’ll Meet Again?” Does 2053 have to be so boring, familiarly sleek and fascist? A few surprises on the design side of the series could have upped its game. Still, it’s a perfect cozy deep dive for a long winter’s night.
(Footnote: Like The Killer, Bodies is based on a graphic novel. While some will prefer the impersonal precision of Fincher’s film, I’m happier with the faux-Dickensian sprawl of Bodies.)
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PARAMOUNT+/SHOWTIME: The Curse and Fellow Travelers
Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder play Whitney and Asher Siegel, newlyweds who descend on a small New Mexico town with the idea of pushing their “sustainable” ecofriendly houses on the locals and making an HGTV show about the process. That’s the premise of The Curse, continuing in 10 weekly episodes through January 24. They’re aided in this quest by loathsome reality TV producer-director Dougie (Benny Safdie, who created the series with Fielder). He’s there to document every single misstep the Siegels make, in the community and in their marriage.
Stone, Fielder and Safdie, all executive producers, are committed to making their characters look oblivious and tone deaf, if not actively appalling. Be forewarned. A little like HBO’s long-running Curb Your Enthusiasm, this kind of cringe comedy isn’t for everybody. I’m committed to keep watching until what increasingly feels like an inevitable car crash of an ending . . .
Also on Paramount+/Showtime, Fellow Travelers is an ambitious look, based on Thomas Mallon’s novel and developed by Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia), at two dismal eras in America for LGBTQ citizens. Set in the 1950s and ’80s, Travelers dramatizes the “Lavender Scare,” the politically motivated persecution of anyone suspected of being gay or lesbian in the years of Sen. Joe McCarthy and his closeted henchman Roy Cohn. (Atlanta playwright Topher Payne’s dramedy Perfect Arrangement also sheds light on this period.) In its second time frame, Travelers lands us in the midst of the AIDS crisis, when gay men and other innocents were dying with no acknowledgment by the Ronald Reagan administration. The show’s eight-episode arc ends on December 15.
Our lovers and antagonists enacting this national drama are careerist Hawk Fuller (Matt Bomer), who beds men on the down low and keeps his political and marital options open to a senator’s daughter (Allison Williams). Hawk’s lovestruck bedroom counterpart is good Catholic boy Tim Laughlin (Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey, giving American Boy Scout vibes). The men’s sex scenes are as steamy as their personalities are diametrically (and dramatically, conveniently) opposed. But Fellow Travelers too often feels like a well-meaning, skin-deep history pageant.
While the two leads — out in their off-screen lives — are remarkably easy on the eye, the show can feel as sci-fi as Bodies. Men of 1950s D.C., gay or not, did not have gym-sculpted bodies like the ones Bomer and Bailey are constantly baring. Yet the unconvincing 1980s scenes can also be distracting — the makeup artists fail to make Bomer or Bailey look 30 years older, much less (in the case of one character) mortally ill from AIDS. The scenes are as convincing as the middle school play where a 12-year-old draws crows feet on his face with eyeliner, salts his hair with talcum powder and plays the grandfather in You Can’t Take It with You.
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NETFLIX: All the Light We Cannot See
All the Light We Cannot See is now two things. First, it’s a poetic, absorbingly written 2014 book that won the Pulitzer Prize. Second, it’s an epically bad four-episode 2023 miniseries that should be studied in media classrooms as an example of how good material can be destroyed by the wrong choices being made during its adaptation to another medium. Here, the culprits are screenwriter Steven Knight and director Shawn Levy. Happy holidays to everyone else who was unfortunately involved in this train wreck.
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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous Streaming columns here.
