May

Rating: R

Run Time: 93 minutes

Director: Lucky McKee

Starring: Angela Bettis, Jeremy Sisto, Anna Faris

The first sentence of this review was going to be, “I don’t know what to make of May.”  Then I looked at the tag for the IMDb of the movie on Google and saw that some reviewer had already had this to say: “Nobody knows what to make of May.”  Dammit.  I couldn’t find the review among the hundreds on the site and I’m not certain if he or she meant May the movie, or May the character in the movie named May.  

I’m still no closer to wrapping my head around this film.  It is a sad and lonely movie, because the titular character is sad and lonely.  It’s odd, too, not because anything about the movie is strikingly unconventional; it’s pretty straightforward.  This is not a criticism of the director, Lucky McKee.  I liked the movie, and while it’s not necessarily one that calls for a great deal of conversation over its meaning, some is in order. 

The opening of the movie provides us a glimpse of May Canady’s childhood.  She is a small, delicate little girl with a lazy right eye.  Her mother covers it with an eye patch.  Then she covers the eye patch with May’s long hair.  May doesn't care for this, so she folds the hair back.  Then a group of kids send an emissary to ask her if she’s a pirate.  When she says no, they walk away from her.  She puts the lock of hair back over her patch.

Her mother decides that she can relieve May’s inability to make friends by giving her a pretty porcelain doll encased in a wood and glass box, sort of like Annabelle from the The Conjuring.  The doll will be her best friend now, but she mustn't touch it.  That’s a no-no, although we're not told why.  Intimacy issues (or the lack thereof) seem to define May's relationship with her mom.

We now skip ahead and next see May as a twenty-something girl, odd-looking but not unattractive, working at a veterinarian clinic and assisting in surgeries.  She does not interact particularly well with others, including the vet’s receptionist, a goofy and lascivious lesbian played by Anna Faris.  One day, May sees a man whose attractiveness enthralls her.  More accurately, she first sees his hands, which seem to match some standard of perfection she holds in her mind’s eye.  He is a good-looking fellow named Adam (Jeremy Sisto) and he works as a car mechanic but has apparent aspirations as a filmmaker.

Because his sensibilities are such that he is himself a bit odd and appears drawn toward the same, Adam is attracted to May.  She is instantly infatuated with him.  She tries to prettify herself; she gets contact lenses that conceal the lazy eye.  Then she sort of starts to stalk Adam.  The terrible problem May is forced to consider, however, which seems to condemn her to a life of solitude, is that, because of the long duration of her self-imposed isolation at this point, she does not know how to act around people or interact with them…at all.  She reminded me of a female Travis Bickle, particularly in the scene where Travis takes Cybil Shepherd to the porn movie.  May relates to bizarrely inappropriate stories and she cannot kiss, she bites: during what begins as a tender lovemaking scene she tries to emulate a scene from Adam’s short movie (which is a bit of a problem because the subject of the movie is cannibal love), May takes a bite out of Adam’s lower lip.  This not only causes a tad bit of pain and surprise, but he bleeds.  She smears the blood over her face.

Adam, not surprisingly, freaks the fuck out and leaves, effectively ending the relationship, which does not end May’s stalking, however.  The rejection mortifies her.  After the relationship end, May tries to lose herself in two more specific attempts to connect with the world around her.  Both end badly.  The glass case of her “best friend” begins to split and crack as she begins a dismal descent into herself that ends in what I can only describe as tragedy and comedy (which I guess makes this a tragicomedy) at movie’s end.

If you have stayed with the film this far and expect anything other than a homicidal frenzy to end it, you have not been paying attention.  And it is this ending that earns the film, at least in part, its credibility as being both horror and black comedy.  But it saddened me, too.  May, as is made abundantly clear, is metaphorically invisible to the world around her, but she does not want to be.  Her hesitating steps toward intimacy with others is pathetic.  She does what she thinks will please Adam and finds that his predilection for the weird does not extend quite that far.  Yet, who can blame him?  Long before she finally freaks out big-time (and I really don’t think that’s a spoiler), you get the sense that a real relationship with her might be dangerous, especially if, as with Adam, you do not meet her idealized standards.    

The movie has some deficiencies.  There is not enough information given us in the prelude regarding May’s upbringing to persuade us convincingly of why she is as strange as she is or why she is, effectively, an outcast from society.  The transition from these brief scenes to the present day is just too abrupt.  There are certainly all sorts of occurrences that can drive us to the despair of isolationism, but surely one damned lazy eye isn’t going to do it.  Now, I suppose if your mother is so obsessed with artificiality and facades as to make you wear an eye-patch because of your lazy eye, then, maybe…?   Still, I’ve had plenty of friends in my life who had a lazy eye and I didn't shun their company.  Would I have done so as a child?  Maybe, but the film does not show us anything to attest to the cruelty of childhood and children.  One kid asking you if you’re a pirate is not going to do it.  Besides, being a child pirate would be kinda cool.

Mrs. Canady is neurotic and embarrassed by May’s eye, of course, and her introduction of the doll and its unattainable perfection is clearly symbolized by the glass case; the glass case is a barrier that prevents May from touching this presumable symbol of sedentary perfection.  It is not clear to me that this is the point where May learns to live within herself and accepts that she, being “flawed” in the sense of being imperfect, is doomed to an existence on the fringe of the real world.  One could alternately argue that it suggests that she, being her mother’s surrogate, rejects everyone else around her because they are not as perfect as the doll behind the case.  Which would make her someone not necessarily to be pitied but something of an elitist instead.     

May’s hold on sanity is as fragile as her precious doll’s glass case.  The simple but effective symbolism of the doll and her increasingly fractured glass environment mirrors May’s descent into madness in the latter part of the movie.  Every new hairline crack in the facade of the glass case represents a further fracturing of May’s fragile psyche.  That said, I am not convinced we are to believe she is insane throughout.  Her inevitable break with reality is triggered by rejection.  Remember, the whole movie is odd, I think, because all of its characters, not just May, are odd themselves.     Adam and Polly, while the film does not at all condemn them, are, to some degree, poseurs.  He likes weird, but only to a point.  She likes weird, too, but is fickle in her passions.  Neither deserve their fates, but you can see them coming just the same.

May, too, is admittedly pretty damned weird from the get-go and clearly batshit crazy at the end, but we, or at least I, still pity her.  I saw this movie around the same time I saw Jennifer’s Body a second time.  I will say this, I believe we are meant to view both as victims: one because of society’s alienating rejection of those who are different, and the other due to the same society’s unrealistic emphasis on physical perfection.  And, really, May is caught in the maw of this one, too.

The Horror Inkwell Rate: 7/10