Notes on a Scandal: MAY DECEMBER

Todd Haynes is a modern master of melodrama, with films that thrive in the tension of societal norms straining to restrain his characters’ natural drives toward it. In his latest film May December, an actress arrives at the home of a family that was once the center of tabloid controversy in hopes of shadowing them for her latest movie role based on their scandal. The actress (Natalie Portman) has only surface-level questions to ask, and a kind of guileless confidence in her ability to soak up something real from the quotidian observations she’ll grok just by hanging around. The matriarch of the family (Julianne Moore), a dotty housewife with a flailing bakery business and a wispy lisping affect, just hopes the movie star won’t be rude (like Judge Judy), and that she’ll play fair with the facts of her life as she sees them. You see, her affair with her much younger husband (Charles Melton) started when he was in 7th grade. They got married after her release from prison, where she had their first child, and weathered a storm of national news attention. She doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with that. Now he’s barely cracked his mid-30s and their offspring are graduating high school. For his part, he really loves his teenage kids, but it’s difficult to reconcile the fact that these fresh-faced youngsters are now older than their dad was when they were born. As the movie draws out his hobby of raising caterpillars to release as butterflies, it’s clear he’s been stunted in his cocoon by the unacknowledged abuse that’s shaped the majority of his life. Meanwhile, when not interviewing the woman’s estranged first family, the actress hovers on the margins of family life for a few weeks, watching in scenes of live wire discomfort as the dysfunction inherent in this family dynamic ripples and bubbles beneath metric tons of denial. The homogenizing force of suburban normality is stretched to the breaking point for these people—and the Savannah setting gives it a sense of oceanfront Southern Gothic as two phonies circle each other and the rest are adrift in the consequences.

Haynes stages scenes with elaborate framing for straight-faced jaw-dropping confessions and twisting entanglements of exploitation. (In tone, it’s somehow the perfect equidistant midpoint between Douglas Sirk’s Eisenhower-era stiffness and John Waters’ lurid vulgarity, right next to Pedro Almodovar in its tightly controlled stylish displays of repressions and unspoken depravities of character.) The lines between actress and her subjects get blurry, especially as the women seem to trade traits—listen to how that lisp drifts between them!—and Haynes loads the frames with mirrors and reflections and cameras and lenses. It’s all about image in that ineffable way. Isn’t that a typically Haynes subject, though? Here’s another of his seductively unsettling melodramas about the tragedy of being unable to recognize your true self behind the artifice you’ve built up around yourself. Like the Barbie doll Carpenters in his experimental Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story or the frosty domestic noirs of his Mildred Pierce or Carol, or the suffocating Sirkian vibrancy in Far From Heaven, he’s once more pinning his characters down with empathetic archness. Here it’s simultaneously moving and at a distance, and often darkly hilarious, in a gripping style pulsing with raw emotion beneath the surface. He uses stinging, borrowed piano cues on the score and a kind of hazy softness to the frames, like he’s dredging up dark truths through the scrim of a 90s ripped-from-the-headlines made-for-TV movie. And yet, by Samy Burch’s emotionally complex screenplay setting the action of the story two decades past its central scandal, and making explicit the ways in which attempting to fictionalize such sensationalized real world melodrama inevitably falls short, it makes for a movie using that distancing effect to be more invested in the long ugly aftermath. That roils underneath the apparent, twisted normality that’s settled over the pain, and no empty gestures of family life or hollow Hollywood artifice can fill that emptiness.

Play it Again:THE BEATLES: GET BACK andTHE VELVET UNDERGROUND

Tasked with shaping a film out of dozens upon dozens of hours of rehearsal footage, Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back is a long, shapeless thing running nearly eight hours over three parts. (The shortest episode is just over two hours; the longest is nearly three.) But the picture isn’t aimless. Taken exclusively from contemporaneous documentary footage chronicling the month of practice, writing, and recording that resulted in The Beatles’ final album, Jackson’s project of duration has an aim of scraping away the myth and rumor that has accumulated around this final period in the band’s life. This footage has remained largely unseen, despite being the foundation for director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 80-minute doc Let it Be, which has been available only as a bootleg for over four decades now. That film has lots of interesting moments, but is clearly a cramped, cut-down look at this moment—iconic melodies interspersed with fleeting glimpses at tensions between Paul, John, George, and Ringo. Jackson’s inclination toward creating spaces (and runtimes) you can wander around and get lost in—a boon to us admirers of his increasingly lengthy Middle-Earth fantasy sojourns—thus acts as an exhumation and expansion of that older film. In the process, through well-judged editing and a generous willingness to let scenes go on and on, it’s as close as a fly-on-the-wall to genius as we can get. There’s a magical moment late in the first episode where Paul is noodling on a guitar, working over a sliver of an idea with a chord, a bit of rhythm, a half-lyric. George joins in with strumming. Ringo adds some vocalizations, a bit of percussion. Then, all of a sudden, there it is. “Get Back.” One of the most iconic rock songs of all time just…appears. The film is full of moments like this as we see a variety of characters—wives, girlfriends, assistants, technicians, celebrity visitors, and so on—mill about and the band expands and contracts as petty disputes and deep tensions are nonetheless able to be resolved in real love and camaraderie. If there’s a sense that this is a band nearing the end, a jostling of artists and personalities not long for this world, there’s also an exhilaration in seeing the work before our eyes. Jackson, who has sand-blasted the archival grain to give it an unreal immediacy, lets us draw our own conclusions for the most part, correcting the record by restoring the humanity to these totemic figures of rock and roll history. Here they are as people, with silly asides, genuine fears, funny running jokes, honest reflections, exciting ideas, productive collaboration, sly banter, and, of course, brilliant talent. It’s a pleasure to spend time in this room—closed off in this rehearsal space and recording booth for hours on end—and exhilarating to see the film open up as they step up on the roof and play for the awestruck passersby one final concert.

What Todd Haynes is up to with The Velvet Underground is more expansive despite a tighter two-hour time limit. He’s out to tell the history of the eponymous short-lived rock band that infamously sold relatively few albums, but, as Brian Eno would say, ”everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band." Haynes gets the information across, but he does so in a concisely sweeping cultural biography of an entire moment in the New York City modern art scene of the 60s and 70s. Haynes is no stranger to prodding the lives of musicians in unexpected ways—his infamous Barbie-starring Karen Carpenter biopic Superstar or glam rock roman à clef Velvet Goldmine—or recreating a bygone style—Far from Heaven’s Sirkian colors and modes. Here he expertly puts us in a particular time, and mindset. The movie flows with music, of course, to situate us in the influences, contemporaries, and the work itself from bandmates Lou Reed, John Cale, Maureen Tucker, and Sterling Morrison. We get biographical sketches and plenty of first-hand testimony from those who were there—some newly recorded from living witnesses, others taken from old interviews from those no longer with us. Haynes then layers these audio elements into an all-consuming aesthetic experience. He is constantly giving us two or more things to look at—the screen is split two, four, six, even twelve times over with separate pieces of wonderfully textured archival finds and some fresh interviews shot in generous vintage stocks. We see clips of television, amateur portraits, movies, ads, news and documentary and self-shot primary-source footage, and, above all, lots of avant-garde films from the time. We see excerpts from radical experimental films from Warhol and Mekas and Anger. We hear from critic Amy Taubin and director John Waters and actress Mary Woronov. At every moment, the screen and the sound is alive with possibility—an exciting and absorbing aesthetic experience. It has a similar entrancing effect to a great museum installation or the striking a-g works it lovingly quotes throughout. Less a dull recitation of a Wikipedia entry set to a YouTube playlist, as so many of these artist biographical documentaries become, Haynes is making a work of art. It not only communicates what the music sounded like and where it came from, it generates what it must’ve felt like to hear it emerge from this particular cultural scene. What a transportingly specific movie, worthy of standing proudly next to the very works it deploys to create its effects.

Into the Storm: DARK WATERS

You know the legal thriller is really working when the faxing sequence is tremendously suspenseful and exquisitely cathartic. By the time it gets to that point in Dark Waters, the film had its hooks in me something fierce. It’s based on the true story of a lawyer (Mark Ruffalo) who, after years as a corporate attorney for chemical companies, takes on the case of a family friend of a friend, a small-town West Virginia farmer (Bill Camp) whose cows are dying off. He thinks it has something to do with the DuPont landfill next door. Intrigued, the big city legal expert pokes around in the case, and the deeper he looks, the darker the picture grows, until he’s convinced he has mountains of evidence proving the corporation has been covering up the danger of one of its most popular chemicals, and has turned a blind eye to the systematic poisoning of the community around its main factory. Ah, but proving it in a court of law, let alone getting fair settlements for the victims, is another thing entirely. A tense film of determined investigation and slow-boiling righteous indignation, director Todd Haynes fully inhabits the mode required of this sharp film of creeping dread and knife-twisting legal complications. Haynes is a filmmaker always sensitive to his character’s moods and attuned to the ways in which society’s structures affect them. Look no further than his swooning, ice-pick-pointed melodramas like Far from Heaven and Carol, in which prejudice and romance are inextricably tied up, or his underrated Wonderstruck, in which secret family trauma echoes across time, or his cult classic unauthorized Karen Carpenter movie Superstar, in which Barbies play all the roles as both experimental provocation and a soulful evocation of a pop star’s objectification made literal. In Dark Waters, the threats to the environment are slowly revealed through documentation and study, and the pollution oozes as sinisterly and secretly as the ways in which the companies maneuver to avoid responsibility. Shorn of overt message movie sentimentality, the film is grimly clear-eyed about how the struggle takes a toll on the human beings at its center, and is as determined as its lead to see it through.

The deeper it goes, the harder it is to shake. Ruffalo has a perfect exhausted energy, ground down by the system, even as he’s enlivened by his newfound purpose. He goes from being a comfortable corporate lawyer, to needing to pull apart the system from the inside out. He risks losing his good-paying job for daring to question the human costs of the business he once was paid to defend. His wife (Anne Hathaway) and children are sympathetic, but as the years stretch on with little progress, it’s hard to watch the toll it takes on him. How does one fight something so overwhelming, when those paid to ignore the problem can outspend and out-wait your efforts? Haynes understands this human fragility is both the reason for protections against corporate malfeasance, and for why it’s so difficult to make them count. He expresses this in the methodical turns of the story — a piercing stab of dread and regret as each new horror sinks in, and the futility of the attempts to fight it threatens to linger indefinitely — and in the blocking that emphasizes the quotidian lopsidedness of the struggle. One striking moment finds Ruffalo small in the frame next to his boss (Tim Robbins), a tall, imposing presence who is often sympathetic, but also conscious of the effect this hitherto profit-less crusade has on their other chemical-company clients. The shot accentuates their physical differences to highlight their unspoken power differential. Its this soft power of paychecks and workplace dynamics (the shadowy, fluorescent cinematography emphasizing sterile-yet-sickly boardrooms and business dinners as eerily as cattle’s illness) that’s discouragement as much as the overt corporate skullduggery and legal maneuvering. So, too, are the disappointed townspeople who see the dogged pursuit of accountability drag on and on without satisfying resolution, and, besides, doesn’t DuPont bring great jobs to town? (A host of great character performers fill out both sides of the case, with constant well-drawn human interest in the legal tension.) It’s no wonder, caught in the middle, our lead grows tired. Unappreciated, underestimated, under pressure, he’s weary. We see how it’s poisoned him; the only cure is to keep fighting for the truth.

Brief Encounter: CAROL

Early in Todd Haynes’s Carol some young adults are hanging out in a projection booth, watching Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd through the tiny window. They know a guy who works at the theater, and so this is a cheap date. One of them is a film buff scribbling in a notebook. “I’m charting the correlation between what they say and what they really feel,” he excitedly tells his pals. It’s 1952 and the world of these characters isn’t ready for some feelings to be spoken aloud, at least in the movies, where Sirkian subtext rules, and real people sublimate their inner melodramas behind tasteful style and hesitant conversation. It may not be representative of everyone’s 1950s, but it’s Haynes’s movieland version thereof, in which he’s slowly unspooling a relationship drama in a most handsomely decorated, elegantly styled period piece. Here repressed surfaces reveal much about real feelings held in check just underneath.

The movie is a romance, doomed by an ephemeral sense of time past, and by the subtle trembling edge of noir underneath the plot mechanics as it gets going. To communicate feelings without bringing them to the surface, Haynes uses elemental tricks of cinematic language, a shot, then a reverse shot, and we see instantly the connection made between two characters. Sparks fly in the space of a cut. We see Therese (Rooney Mara), a young woman working in a department store, a little meek and quiet, but happy with her modest life. She sees across the room a striking statuesque customer. This is Carol (Cate Blanchett). They have an instant liking for each other, a slow flirtation so undetectable as to be positively subliminal. Carol orders a train set for her small daughter, carefully filling out the delivery form with her home address. After the transaction, Therese sees Carol left her gloves on the counter and decides to return them. One thing leads to another, and swiftly they have a friendship. Deeper connection happens slowly, and then all of a sudden, a rush of feelings and impulses. They’re falling in love.

Their encounter is disrupted by the realities of their lives. Therese has to cancel a trip with her boyfriend (Jake Lacy). Carol is embroiled in an increasingly messy divorce from her husband (Kyle Chandler). But it’s Christmas time, and they decide to celebrate together, heading off on a road trip. They live by night. In hotel rooms and diners they grow closer, but there’s a sense of inevitable ruin, in the way Carol’s husband sneers about her morality, and in the way Therese’s porcelain features reveal hesitance, like she’s not totally ready to give herself over to the new feelings she’s expressing. Haynes views their connection with tender sympathy, understanding the attraction between them, emotionally as well as physically. Two walled-off people, desperately alone in their daily lives despite the hustle and bustle of friends and co-workers, cautiously decide to drop their guards for each other, even if only for one momentary flash. It culminates in a beautiful sequence of connection, only to be followed by the glancing blows of unexpected tightening of obligations beyond their union.

Like David Lean’s Brief Encounter, one of the greatest of all screen romances, Haynes finds in Carol a film capable of imbuing a simple motion, like a hand on a shoulder, with tremendous emotional power. Because he’s so beautifully restrained in presenting the story’s dramatic turns, and so careful to craft characters through glimmers of interiority behind revealing gestures, he creates surfaces that shine with intense feeling, weighted with the burden of deep longing and sadness. It’s one thing to use period detail – vintage sunglasses and coats, records and Santa hats – to communicate a sense of midcentury nostalgia. It’s another entirely to convert those soft pangs of remembered history into the ache and regret over an affair ended too soon. Adapted by Phyllis Nagy from the novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley), it’s told as a lengthy flashback with a framing device delicately folded back in on itself. What we’re seeing is already done, a meaningful brief encounter that can never be recaptured.

To pull off this effect, Haynes needs every element of filmmaking working at a high level of artistry and in conjunction with one another. There’s no room for error in a movie whose every detail is so freighted with meaning. He pulls off a flawless unity: a rich, colorful, slightly faded look from Edward Lachman’s cinematography populated with Mad Men fastidiousness in the production and art design, while a tremulous Carter Burwell score swirls with Glass-ian textures underlining lavish romanticism and tense domestic drama. Blanchett and Mara, dressed in impeccable clothes by Sandy Powell, give placid performances, valuing stillness and inscrutable glances, the better for Haynes’s technique to fill in meaning around them, and for gestures – a drag on a cigarette, a tug on a sleeve, a touch that lingers – to say more than the characters ever could, or would. Unlike Haynes’s Far from Heaven, a more overt 50’s melodrama pastiche, or his Mildred Pierce, a more overt domesticated noir, Carol is reserved, betting on subtle inflections of drama to emerge in conflict depressingly truthful to its time, and in love wistfully fleeting.