May December review — Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore dominate
★★★★☆
The director Todd Haynes reunites here with his talismanic star Julianne Moore for another round of brittle interpersonal mayhem. The pair are a dream team, and have arguably produced Haynes’s best movies. First, in 1995, there was Safe, in which Moore played a seemingly fragile suburban housewife who became physiologically allergic to modern living. Then, in 2002, there was lush, Oscar-nominated Far from Heaven, which cast Moore as, yep, a seemingly fragile suburban housewife, trapped by a pincer movement of racism and homophobia in 1950s Connecticut. In this new movie, perhaps unsurprisingly, Moore is a contemporary suburban homemaker, seemingly fragile, who is being punished once again by external societal forces. The twist this time round is that she deserves it. Or does
