Dan Webster: ‘May December’ outlines inappropriate events of teacher-student affair in Netflix film

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel,” the 18th-century author and politician Horace Walpole wrote, “but a comedy to those who think.”

That platitude may explain why some critics consider Todd Haynes’ Netflix film “May December” to be a dark comedy, while others see it as a strange take on a real-life story bound up in events that were surely more tragic than anything remotely comic.

Those events involve Burien, Washington, schoolteacher Mary Kay Letourneau who, during the summer of 1996, was caught having an affair with one of her 12-year-old students. Arrested, tried and sentenced to prison, then released but rearrested and imprisoned again, Letourneau finally emerged from behind bars and promptly married her by-then-21-year-old former student.

In Haynes’ film, which is based on an original screenplay by Samy Burch, the Letourneau equivalent is Gracie (played by Julianne Moore). Now in her late 50s, Gracie is married to Joe (played by Charles Melton), the man who 23 years earlier was the 13-year-old boy she was caught having sex with. The two now have three children, two of whom (played, respectively, by Elizabeth Yu and Gabriel Chung) are about ready to leave home for college.

Into their life comes Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), an actress who is planning to make a movie about Gracie. Intent on researching the life that Gracie and Joe are living in Savannah, Georgia, Elizabeth interviews a number of their family and friends.

And while she discovers what appears to be a standard domestic situation, Elizabeth does see signs that not everyone in the community is accepting of the situation – one example being a package full of dog feces that is left on the family’s doorstep.

Another is something she is told by Gracie’s son from her first marriage, the mercurial and understandably resentful Georgie (played by Cory Michael Smith). Gradually, Elizabeth’s presence begins to effect changes in Gracie and Joe’s marriage, bringing to light feelings – especially for Joe – that have been long suppressed.

What is unusual about Haynes’ version of the story, however, isn’t what happens onscreen as much as how it happens. Moore’s Gracie flip-flops between emotions, one moment uptight and distraught, the next calm and in control. Coldly searching for a character to play, Portman’s Elizabeth, too, shifts moods, though in her case from seeming sincerity to outright duplicity.

And then there’s that musical score, which Haynes uses in moments that feel as intrusive as what plays during the most obvious moments of TV soap operas.

Altogether a strange production, “May December” does boast some moving scenes, such as when Joe eventually questions Gracie about who seduced whom. Such moments could pass as a seminar in acting, particularly by the two past Best Actress Oscar winners, Moore and Portman. But Melton, too, holds his own as a man-child who is only gradually realizing what his life has been – and yet still could be.

If, though, Haynes thought he was actually making a serious study of what causes people to act in ways so counter to commonly accepted social standards – well, that’s funny in and of itself.