Vili Fualaau Does Not Like 'May December,' As Predicted by 'May December'

Mary Kay Letourneau's ex spoke to the Hollywood Reporter this week in a situation that the movie was basically designed to anticipate.

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This story necessarily begins with a brief recap: director Todd Haynes recently made a movie called May December (producer Natalie Portman brought Haynes the script, written by Samy Burke, which made the Blacklist), in which Natalie Portman plays an actress who travels to Savannah to study for her role as the tabloid famous woman who left her husband for a middle schooler in the 90s.

While the teacher and student in the film (Julianne Moore and Charles Melton) were named Gracie and Joe Yoo, the source material was plainly obvious to anyone who lived through the nineties — Mary Kay Letourneau and Villi Fualaau, the former the latter’s teacher, who started dating when she was in her 30s and he was 12. This was back in the days when the broadcast media decided on the memes, and that was the material we had to work with for the entire year. Letourneau went to prison, but had Fualaau’s children and they got married, only splitting up many years later.

Well, now Villi Fualaau has actually seen May December, (Letourneau died in 2020), and to the surprise of probably no one, he wishes the filmmakers had actually talked to him about it first.

From The Hollywood Reporter:

“I’m still alive and well,” says Fualaau, now 40 and still living in the Seattle area, where the scandal unfolded. “If they had reached out to me, we could have worked together on a masterpiece. Instead, they chose to do a ripoff of my original story.

“I’m offended by the entire project and the lack of respect given to me — who lived through a real story and is still living it,” he adds.

—

“I love movies — good movies,” he says. “And I admire ones that capture the essence and complications of real-life events. You know, movies that allow you to see or realize something new every time you watch them.

“Those kinds of writers and directors — someone who can do that — would be perfect to work with, because my story is not nearly as simple as this movie [portrays],” Fualaau adds.

The irony of this is that, as we discussed in our May-December podcast about it, it seems like the thought process that led to this movie was, the writers (Samy Burke and Alex Mechanik share story credit) imagined making a Mary Kay Letourneau movie, then imagined what the process of making that movie would entail (talking to the real characters in the story), thought that process would be kind of gross, and ended up making a sort of meta-meditation on the inherent grossness of that kind of art. The movie is partly an artist’s rendition of the Letourneau-Fualaau relationship, and partly how they imagine what it would be like to create a 100% faithful version of that.

Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth, the actress sent to play Moore’s Letourneau character, and Elizabeth is kind of a modern twist on the ruthlessly ambitious actress type immortalized in All About Eve. Only in this case, rather than practicing her Oscars speech in the mirror (though Elizabeth kind of does that too), she’s masturbating to the thought of a tabloid famous statutory rape scene inside the snake room of a pet store (the movie made their Letourneau a coworker of the boy at a petstore rather than his teacher). May December’s ruthless skewering of actors and writers was probably my favorite part of the movie. (Which is probably not surprising, the best comedy usually comes at the expense of people we know the best).

Yet if the filmmakers’ goal was to avoid all the slimy feelings that come with telling living people’s stories by calling themselves out for their own sort of slimy, sensationalist impulses, and by extension the sort of slimy sensationalism of all storytelling, they didn’t quite succeed. At least, they succeeded in making a pretty entertaining movie, but not in entirely removing themselves from some perceived responsibility to their subjects (changing the names doesn’t accomplish anything if the source material is this obvious).

Ben Flores put this nicely succinctly on Twitter:

there's an ethical question and an artistic question and they intersect but they're not the same. making art about somebody can do harm to them. but getting their permission won't make the art better. but even if the art is great, it may or may not excuse the harm

Which is to say that there was no way to make a movie about Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau, no matter how wink-wink fictionalized, without risking either the subjects being pissed, or the movie being bad, or both. I think the filmmakers probably knew this, and it was part of the feeling they were trying to work through in the movie. Even now it’s hard not to hear a little of Cory Michael Smith as Georgie (the Letourneau character’s pre-affair son, who was the same age as Fualaau) in the movie when you read Fualaau’s quotes. “Hey, the movie would’ve been better if you’d just asked me. You want a good story? I’ve got some stories that could knock your socks off.”

In the movie, Georgie has had a hard life and is sympathetic to some degree, but also tries to shake Portman’s character down for a job and feeds her maybe lies about his mom’s childhood. Portman’s character realizes she has to get away from him if she has any hope of telling a “true” story at all, and she’s probably right. Though as a viewer you realize that Georgie’s story is probably more interesting than the one Portman’s character is trying to tell. I’d like to hear Fualaau’s version of the story just like I would Georgie’s, though that’s no guarantee either would be able to tell it truthfully and/or compellingly.

I wrote about the biopic business for the Ringer last year, but I think there’s a general perception that if filmmakers are as faithful as possible to the biopic subject or the biopic subjects’ estate, that it will produce the best movie and everyone will be happy. Leonard Bernstein’s family rushed to defend Bradley Cooper for wearing a prosthetic nose to play their dad. The upcoming Bob Marley biopic proudly trumpets the Marley estate’s approval. It happens all the time.

Broadly speaking, it seems like we’ve gotten a lot of happy estates and a lot of shitty art. (Bohemian Rhapsody being just one example of the gatekeepers of a subject's legacy being at odds with many others’ perception of it). May December tried to do something different (or maybe tried to find a third way? I think they probably knew this would happen, but YMMV), and guess what, their subject isn’t entirely pleased.

I don’t think that means every artist should be an asshole who doesn’t care about how their art affects the people it depicts, just that they should go in acknowledging the general impossibility of making everyone happy. (“We’re telling his truth,” which was Eva Longoria’s excuse for her not attempting the real truth in her fraudulent Flamin Hot movie, is not a viable alternative either). As Ben said, the artistic question and the ethical question are occasionally intersecting but distinct.

The best way to do it is probably to just put out the one you can live with. As Phil Rosenthal was fond of saying, “just make your show; they’re gonna cancel it anyway.”