How Hollywood Flipped The May-December Romance So Older Women Rule

It’s been a year of older female actors getting their groove back. And Nicole Kidman isn’t even done yet.

If you’re catching a movie at the mall this year, be prepared for Nicole Kidman to prove her passion for the cinema, twice over. After you’ve been greeted by her campy AMC promo, the lights will dim as the 57-year-old superstar strips off that power suit for Babygirl, her Venice Film Festival award-winning performance as a CEO savouring a sadomasochistic fling with her much-younger intern, played by 28-year-old Harris Dickinson. Kidman looks as fantastic as ever, but it’s the look in her eyes – ecstasy, greed, heat – that’s a screen pleasure we’ve rarely seen. In one scene, she gazes in lustful awe as a shirtless Dickinson strips to (irony alert) George Michael’s Father Figure; in another, after another, her character enjoys the most shattering climaxes of her life.

Heart palpitations feel good in a place like this.

And Kidman’s not alone. Hollywood has flipped the script of the May-December romance with a string of attention-grabbing grapplings between mature women and junior men. Pick your favourite pairing among these releases with age gaps up to 32 years: Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine (The Idea of You), Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth (Lonely Planet), Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman (the upcoming I Want Your Sex), Léa Drucker and Samuel Kircher (Last Summer) and Carol Kane and Jason Schwartzman (Between the Temples). As for Kidman, she’s made two – for A Family Affair, she also bedded Zac Efron.

You don’t need me to point out that this is a cultural pivot. Not so long ago, the entertainment industry tucked away women of a certain age on Sexless Mom Island while their male peers wooed girls young enough to be their daughters and granddaughters. MILF Manor? Most producers would have had it condemned.

When an older woman did pursue a younger man, the best possible version was Stella getting her groove back, and then, bizarrely, having to marry her fling to ensure that domesticity won out over liberation. Otherwise, we get Maude bonding with Harold over their mutual affection for self-harm and Thelma and Louise running off a cliff after a lousy one-night stand. And then there are the movies that result in murder or accusations of rape – Norma Desmond going to pieces over the callow screenwriter Joe Gillis, or Mrs Robinson risking her daughter’s wrath for a romp with Benjamin Braddock – where a woman’s socially unacceptable obsession flat-out makes her go mad.

Yet, the real indignity of The Graduate comes when Dustin Hoffman plants his first smooch on Anne Bancroft’s cool sophisticate just when she’s inhaled a mouthful of cigarette smoke. Bancroft’s eyes widen, then narrow with resignation and scorn. But if the character she’s playing had any reality in her – if the script had genuine hormones – Mrs Robinson would have fled back to the hotel bar to find anyone better than this twerp.

That klutzy kissing gag was recycled from an old Mike Nichols and Elaine May comedy skit written in the 50s about two teenagers necking in a car. I can empathise with why Nichols crammed a proven laugh-getter into his sophomore movie. Yet I loathe that joke because from that moment on, no matter how much Bancroft gives to the movie, the movie doesn’t give her any motivation to keep sleeping with this chump. In the bedroom montage that follows, Benjamin is more dead frog than prince.

And in the decades that followed, Hoffman would himself slide into the Mrs Robinson roles and stay there comfortably until he was 71 and courting 49-year-old Emma Thompson in Last Chance Harvey. That twosome, of course, didn’t cause controversy. A decade ago, an ordinary trip to the cinema might have entailed Margot Robbie (24) gallivanting with Will Smith (46), or Emma Stone (25) partnered in back-to-back movies with Sean Penn and Colin Firth (both 53). When Birdman won best picture at the 2015 Academy Awards, not one feather was ruffled that Andrea Riseborough (32) played the pregnant girlfriend of Michael Keaton (63).

One year later, the #MeToo rumblings began. With them came a sense of disgust that the culture had inured itself to entitled older men who felt they deserved to grab a woman wherever – on-screen and, more harmfully, off, by gatekeepers such as Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein, who could prevent an actor from appearing on-screen at all. Nudity that had once been begrudgingly tolerated as a rite of passage – say, that an ingenue will face pressure to flash her chest until she’s earned the clout to say no – was suddenly scrutinised for any whiff of ethical harm. The elder-man-meets-nubile-girl trope slunk away sheepishly into the shadows, mostly.

Recently, a UCLA study reported that Generation Z had lost interest in erotic scenes, waving them off as gratuitous and exploitative. It might be more accurate to say they’d lost trust in them, with good reason. There’s enough old schlock streaming out there to give sex a bad reputation: the phony, gauzy wham-bam thrustings, the postcoital sheets that never stretch high enough to cover a woman’s breasts, the buddy comedies that detour to a strip club just because.

I side with those grievances. Hathaway, Dern, Wilde and Kane all grappled with them firsthand in their 20s, playing romantic scenes with men two decades their senior in, respectively, Get Smart, Jurassic Park, Third Person and The World’s Greatest Lover. And yet, I’m also a critic who believes that a well-crafted sex scene can truly reveal a character, can have as much emotional subtext as Mona Lisa’s smile – that a nearby bedroom can pack as much suspense as Hitchcock’s ticking bomb.

So, it feels exactly right that these same female actors, who have all turned 40, should be the ones confidently taking the industry in hand to lead it away from superheroes with shiny-smooth codpieces. They’ve earned the clout to say yes on their terms. Honestly, Hollywood’s gotten too squeamish to let anyone else do it. Two young people? Who knows what the kids are into! Two middle-aged people? Only if it’s a murder-thriller. A divorced dad and a cheerleader? Are you trying to get us picketed?! But an older woman and a younger man? That’s nontoxic titillation.

Kidman, the unofficial flag-bearer for this revolution, has been canoodling with younger men since her breakout role in 1994′s To Die For, when her married newscaster seduced and destroyed Joaquin Phoenix’s teenage delinquent. She first tempted Zac Efron in 2012′s The Paperboy, when he was freshly out of Disney boot camp, and in between those films, rattled audiences in Jonathan Glazer’s Birth as a widow who considers dumping her new fiance for a 10-year-old boy who claims to be the reincarnation of her dead husband.

These fearless performances are among the standouts of Kidman’s already sterling filmography. Yet, they also slot neatly next to Maude, Norma and poor Mrs Robinson as women motivated by death or ego or ennui – anything but lust. Twelve years ago, when Kidman shrugged off her robe for Efron in The Paperboy, it was with indifference: “All right. Just this once.”

But this year, Kidman’s characters put their own desire front and centre on the screen – and, if you see Babygirl in the cinema, in an orgasm that’s 9m tall. I hope she and the other female actors in this mini May-December movie marathon can snap the chains of Hollywood’s chastity belt and convince audiences that on-screen sex doesn’t have to be awkward or abusive or a joke. It can also be, well, sexy.

More on-screen sensuality

How Hollywood handles sex.

How Gay Was Ancient Rome? Historians say the homoeroticism of Gladiator II is not a far-fetched proposition.

Is Mikey Madison Dancing Her Way To An Oscar? Immersed in the role, the introverted actor got “almost too comfortable” in strip clubs.

Disney’s Glorious ‘Rivals’ Romp Stays True To Jilly Cooper’s Spirit. Be warned, nudity abounds in this gleeful adaptation.

Zendaya, Luca Guadagnino, Josh O’Connor & Mike Faist On ‘Challengers’. The ambition, jealousy and “erotic amusement” of the Luca Guadagnino film.

Nicholas Galitzine Wants To Prove He’s More Than Just A Pretty Face. The British actor hopes his steamy new dramas will change how Hollywood sees him.