What is a True story in May-December?
I’ve been considering The Lisp a lot. If you’ve seen the unsettling new drama May December by director Todd Haynes, which is currently available to stream on Netflix, you will be familiar with the accent I’m referring to—that uncomfortable babyish, swollen-tongued one that Julianne Moore’s character, Gracie Atherton-Yoo, puts on—or lets out—every time her surroundings become too discordant for her ears. Since her tabloid story broke in the 1990s, she has been exposed to a lot of noise; the lisp appears anytime she feels the need to turn off the broadcast. The problem with her approach is that there are many things Gracie needs to hear, but she won’t listen, as Haynes continually shows on top of Samy Burch’s superb screenplay.
Like a lot of May December, the lisp is a fabrication, a distorted mirror image of actual events that give the movie its intense, painful feel. Mary Kay Letourneau, a schoolteacher in the Seattle region who admitted to two counts of secondary rape in 1997 after being found having sex with her 13-year-old student, is the inspiration behind Gracie Atherton-Yoo. (She would give birth to two of his kids prior to his fifteenth birthday.) This student turned out to be Vili Fualaau in the end, and he married Letourneau, a relationship that lasted for almost 15 years until ending in divorce in 2019. He also happened to be Joe (Charles Melton), Gracie’s spouse in May December. Letourneau passed away from cancer not long after, at the age of 58.
Letourneau didn’t have a noticeable lisp in her speech, but Haynes noted after the film’s May December debut at the New York Film Festival that Letourneau had “kind of a loose upper palate that we did find interesting,” adding that Moore “took it further” for the part of Gracie. She goes even farther in moments where Gracie is feeling unstable, such when Joe confronts her with things they haven’t talked about in a long time—”maybe ever.” She abruptly ends this line of inquiry, insisting, her lisp growing louder, “You seduced me. Who was in command?
