Spoilers beneath.
I’ve been considering rather a lot about The Lisp. In case you’ve watched director Todd Haynes’ unsettling new drama Could December, now streaming on Netflix, then precisely to which I’m referring: the uncomfortably babyish, swollen-tongued accent Julianne Moore’s character, Gracie Atherton-Yoo, places on (or lets out) each time her environment develop a key too dissonant for her ears. She’s heard a lot noise since her tabloid story cracked open within the ’90s; the lisp pops up each time she feels a have to tune out the printed. The problem together with her technique, as Haynes repeatedly demonstrates atop the inspiration of Samy Burch’s glorious screenplay, is that there’s rather a lot Gracie wants to listen to, and to which she refuses to hear.
The lisp itself, like a lot of Could December, is a fabrication, a warped-mirror model of real-life particulars that infuse the movie with its brutal ache. Gracie Atherton-Yoo is loosely primarily based on Mary Kay Letourneau, the Seattle-area schoolteacher who, in 1997, pled responsible to 2 counts of secondary rape after she was found in a sexual relationship together with her 13-year-old scholar. (She would give start to 2 of his kids earlier than he turned 15.) This scholar was ultimately revealed as Vili Fualaau, and he—like Joe (Charles Melton), Gracie’s husband in Could December—would go on to marry Letourneau, their partnership lasting almost 15 years earlier than they divorced in 2019. Quickly after, Letourneau died of most cancers on the age of 58.
Though Letourneau didn’t communicate with a definite lisp, she did have what Haynes described at Could December’s New York Movie Pageant premiere as “sort of a free higher palate that we did discover fascinating,” including that Moore “took it additional” for the position of Gracie. She takes it all of the a lot additional in scenes the place Gracie feels destabilized, corresponding to when Joe confronts her on the problems they haven’t mentioned, “possibly ever.” She shuts this line of questioning down instantly, her lisp intensifying as she insists, “You seduced me. Who was in cost?”
It’s this identical lisp that Natalie Portman’s character, the TV actress Elizabeth Berry, employs as a type of portal into Gracie herself. Initially of Could December, Elizabeth is making ready to painting Gracie in a movie adaptation of the latter’s life and scandal. Close to the movie’s finish, we watch Elizabeth rehearse a protracted monologue lifted from an outdated love letter from Gracie to Joe. Her use of Gracie’s lisp is fixed and cartoonish. Elizabeth, a predatory and second-rate actress, mischaracterizes Gracie’s lisp as an have an effect on to parrot, reasonably than an perception into the latter’s fissuring veneer. Haynes makes use of the lisp as its personal meta-critique, consultant of the various nuances missed when an outsider fixates on the best model of a narrative.
Haynes directing Charles Melton and Julianne Moore in Could December.
That is additionally why Could December is cautious to not coloration in the very same traces because the Letourneau scandal, usually side-eyeing its tabloid origins with bleak humor. The characters’ names are modified; they reside throughout the nation, in Georgia reasonably than Washington; Gracie is a baker, not a schoolteacher; she and Joe met as pet-shop staff, not as instructor and scholar. Within the movie’s ultimate scene, Elizabeth, as Gracie, visibly lusts over the actor enjoying Joe whereas she slides a pet snake into his arms, promising the creature gained’t chunk as a result of it’s “not that sort of snake.” That is all very humorous, and never humorous in any respect.
As Burch advised the Movement Image Affiliation in an interview, “There was a acutely aware effort to fictionalize this with all of the little particulars. The massive-picture particulars are related, however I wished to invent names, locations, their historical past, their households, their jobs.” She equally advised Vogue that “the reckoning we’ve had the place, one after the other, these tales have been mined and relooked at—generally for the higher, generally not—has been very fascinating to me.” Her Could December script demonstrates a transparent sense of duty to not Letourneau and even essentially to Fualaau, however to the methods during which the phenomenon of their scandal mirrors our present true-crime obsession. Only a few individuals are harmless in Could December, as Joe himself mourns in one other funny-not-funny scene throughout which he smokes marijuana and tells his son, between sobs, “I really feel like all the things’s so fucked up.”
Gracie or Elizabeth are maybe the obvious perpetrators, and Haynes and Burch don’t search to forgive them any greater than to pardon Letourneau. However they’re equally eager about implicating these of us watching, in addition to these of us googling (and writing) tales like this one, probing into the movie’s tabloid origins. It’s all meant to make us greater than a little bit queasy. As Haynes advised Vulture, “The response to Could December, to date, has made me really feel like individuals need to be—are there to be—confused and disturbed and unsure about what they consider motion pictures once more. And I really like that, as a result of that’s at all times what motion pictures ought to do to you.”
Letourneau put forth plenty of tales to the media again within the ’90s, each earlier than and after Fualaau might communicate for himself. She knowledgeable Oprah Winfrey that “I believe, with all certainty, this younger man is the love of my life,” and the Seattle Instances reported that she referred to the boy as “my finest buddy. We simply walked collectively in the identical rhythm.” Years later, Fualaau himself insisted “on the finish of the day, it was an actual love story,” although he added, “Quite a lot of issues that ought to have gone by way of my thoughts on the time weren’t going by way of my thoughts.”
Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau in 2006.
After Letourneau died, Fualauu sat down for an emotional 2020 interview with Dr. Oz, throughout which he shared how a lot he missed his ex-wife. He referred to her as “the one particular person that really cared, contemplating my upbringing and her upbringing. Quite a lot of issues simply made sense for the each of us in the way in which issues occurred.” He admitted he used to “query” if she was a pedophile, however that “there was no perversion” of their relationship or in Letourneau’s historical past. “There’s nothing I can say to people who don’t care to hear or don’t care to be taught,” he added. Nonetheless, when requested what he would do if he—now in his 30s—discovered himself drawn to a minor, Fualaau replied, “I’d most likely go and search some assist.”
So many of those nuances—the bond felt between Gracie and Joe; the love for his or her kids; Joe’s gut-wrenching inner battle over what occurred to him; Gracie’s coping mechanisms, together with her method of talking—certainly spin from the identical spool as the actual Letourneau-Fualauu story. However Could December doesn’t fake to copy that actual story, nor its exact circumstances. As a substitute, the movie takes a sideways strategy, and in doing so bounces the confusion and discomfort proper again to the viewers. It dares you, like Elizabeth, to mistake The Lisp for what’s “actual.”
Tradition Author
Lauren Puckett-Pope is a workers tradition author at ELLE, the place she primarily covers movie, tv and books. She was beforehand an affiliate editor at ELLE.
