Is she bad?
Both May December and Eileen are meant to make us a little queasy as our moral judgments come up short.
Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore in May December (Photo by Francois Duhamel / Netflix)
“Is she bad?” my 13-year-old asked as he wandered into the living room while I was watching May December (directed by Todd Haynes, streaming on Netflix). On the screen Natalie Portman was sitting silently in a stairwell, lost in private ecstasy. But the score conveyed danger: minor chords on the piano hammering over swelling strings.
“Well,” I said, “it’s hard to say.”
May December joins Eileen (directed by William Oldroyd) as two brilliant additions to a specialized genre of films we might call movies of moral queasiness—films that generate unsettling sympathies, introducing a kind of ethical vertigo as the ground shifts under our feet.
