The annual Cannes Film Festival is once again full of glamour, serious cinema, and strivers crowding the sidewalk of the Croisette. Like the Sandler vehicle, it is loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, who seduced and raped a year-old boy in the s and later married him. Moore plays Gracie, a baker in her late 50s now married to year-old Joe Charles Melton , a sweet husband and father who has a fascination with breeding monarch butterflies. As their twin children are graduating high school, the family is visited by well-known actress Elizabeth Natalie Portman , about to embark on playing Gracie in a film.
Portman gives her biggest, harshest, and best performance yet in a role that combines the odd coolness of Jackie with a tinge of the pathos of Black Swan.
Haynes brings bizarre humor to the film without ever mocking the deep pain in every character. Melton is a standout. The film is shot in an understated way. Only the macro shots of caterpillars turning into butterflies seem too metaphorical, and closer to the work Moore and Haynes did most recently in Far From Heaven. Two other auteur directors, Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson, combine previous styles and stars to mixed but fascinating results. De Niro plays William Hale, a rich white cattleman and pillar of his local community in Oklahoma.
Secretly, he is also methodically murdering the richest members of the Indigenous Osage Nation for their money and rights to the oil-rich land.
Part of his plan is to marry off Osage women to his relatives, including DiCaprio. De Niro gives a more subtle performance, mixing self-righteousness, racism, and charity in a way that feels terrifying and archetypically American. They are in love, and he is slowly killing her, and neither of these things cancels out the other. Gladstone gives what may be the best female lead performance in a Scorsese film. After an incident, all visitors to the local motel are in lockdown, subsisting on pie, flapjacks, and automat martinis that only come with a twist, no olive.
