How Has Hollywood Dealt With Age-Gap Relationships?

Hollywood age gaps, onscreen and off, have become a lightning rod. In our more socially circumspect era, any movie that does not expressly condemn its characters’ cross-generational courtship is subject to scores of internet discourse, from measured think pieces and combative Reddit threads to incensed tweets and TikTok takedowns. “Brace yourself for more age-gap discourse,” the respected showbiz blog Lainey Gossip wrote when the May December trailer debuted in September, expressing an appropriate degree of exhaustion over the knee-jerk reactions that are now common. Throughout Hollywood history, the films that critics and general audiences did or didn’t rebuke for their age-gap narratives tell a fascinating story about what the mainstream deems acceptable when it comes to sex and relationships.

The movie: Charade (1963)
The pairing: Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn
The reaction: By 1963, Hepburn had co-starred with three different actors twice her age (Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire, and Gary Cooper) — not that anyone seemed to care. Grant, 25 years her senior, apparently felt uncomfortable wooing someone who could be his daughter, so he asked writer Peter Stone to tweak this screwball mystery’s script so that her character pursues him. “The occasional use of broader comedy includes one hilarious bit when the heroine tries to disrobe the hero so she can search his suit,” Variety’s Robert B. Frederick raved. By alluding to their age divide head-on, Charade gives Hepburn more agency than her earlier roles did.

The movie: The Graduate (1967)
The pairing: Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman
The reaction: Mrs. Robinson’s seduction of an aimless 21-year-old rarely endured age-gap dismissal because it’s so clear she is The Graduate’s shrewdest character. Revisiting Mike Nichols’s era-defining satire of American life 30 years after its release, Roger Ebert went so far as to say it’s the graduate himself who’s the “creep.” She, on the other hand, is “the only person in the movie you would want to have a conversation with.”

The movie: Harold and Maude (1971)
The pairing: Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort
The reaction: Critics who damned Hal Ashby’s comedy when it opened were less queasy about the characters’ ages, which read as farcical: Harold is 20, Maude 79. They were instead critical of their morbid death complexes, which viewers at the time saw as a nihilistic downer; today the movie is seen more as a twisted celebration of life.

The movie: Last Tango in Paris (1972)
The pairing: Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider
The reaction: Bernardo Bertolucci’s transgressive art drama is inseparable from the humiliation Schneider, who was 20 at the time, has said she suffered while filming a rape scene with Brando, 48, that wasn’t in the script. But for all its attendant controversy in the ’70s, many people applauded Last Tango. “The girl is young, conscious of her beauty and the developing powers of her body,” Ebert observed. Molly Haskell said the liberated sexuality it depicts was as “key to [women’s] emancipation” as any other form of self-actualization.

The movie: Manhattan (1979)
The pairing: Woody Allen and Mariel Hemingway
The reaction: Manhattan’s witty dialogue and silky black-and-white cinematography beguiled audiences, who largely denied the ickiness of the central relationship between a middle-aged divorced man and a 17-year-old girl. Ebert commended the fact that it doesn’t “hint at cradle-snatching.” Only in the wake of Me Too and the renewed attention surrounding Dylan Farrow’s molestation allegations has the film been significantly reevaluated.

The movie: Poison Ivy (1992)
The pairing: Tom Skerritt and Drew Barrymore
The reaction: The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum called Poison Ivy, a centerpiece of Barrymore’s youthful rebellion, “high-class kiddie porn.” The way men can ignore the welfare of attractive young women is a theme of Katt Shea’s melodrama, in which the savvy high-schooler played by a 17-year-old Barrymore doesn’t have to work very hard to seduce her friend’s midlife-addled father (59-year-old Skerritt). Erotic thrillers starring adults were all the rage in the early ’90s, but Poison Ivy’s age disparity outstripped even the genre’s most lurid tendencies. Longtime Austin Chronicle critic Marjorie Baumgarten fretted about its “shocking carnality.” Some critics compared Barrymore’s character to Lolita, a parallel that resurfaced the following year when Barrymore portrayed real-life tabloid fixture Amy Fisher.

The movie: Entrapment (1999)
The pairing: Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones
The reaction: Critics couldn’t ignore the 39-year gap in this middling heist caper. Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum deemed it a “stumbling block” made knottier by the protagonists’ “weird father-daughter dynamic.” Not everyone saw it as a problem, though. “It helps that the romance isn’t overworked and that [Connery’s character] has an imperious, crotchety streak to keep his much younger partner at bay,” Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times.

The movie: Call Me by Your Name (2017)
The pairing: Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet
The reaction: Although the relationship in Luca Guadagnino’s swoony summer romance does not read as predatory, the very idea of it became a bellwether. By late-2010s standards, even a relatively modest age difference, like the one between 17-year-old Elio (Chalamet) and 24-year-old Oliver (Hammer), could raise eyebrows among progressives and conservatives alike. But critics were thoughtful in their analyses of the subject. “Human desire can be far more complex and intractable than we might like to admit,” wrote Slate’s Jeffrey Bloomer. “Not every relationship removed from our comfort zone is abuse.”

The movie: Licorice Pizza (2021)
The pairing: Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman
The reaction: If Manhattan’s teenage liaison sounded almost no alarm bells in 1979, the ones that followed Licorice Pizza were deafening four decades later — even though the latter film is far more self-aware. The fact that 15-year-old Gary (Hoffman) and 25-ish-year-old Alana (Haim) share no more than a kiss didn’t stop TikTokers and redditors from accusing Paul Thomas Anderson of promoting pedophilia.

The movie: Priscilla (2023)
The pairing: Jacob Elordi and Cailee Spaeny
The reaction: Sofia Coppola’s work is a humanistic portrait of a real relationship that began when Priscilla was 14 (Elvis was 24) and lasted until she left him at 28. A vocal internet minority reproached early Priscilla trailers that didn’t overtly condemn Elvis Presley (Elordi) for courting the film’s titular subject (Spaeny). Even if Coppola’s rendering is subtle, to claim that age wasn’t among the director’s narrative interests would be disingenuous. “Coppola’s glistening and brooding dissection of Priscilla’s life with Elvis reveals a clear-eyed vision for depicting the intoxication of fame and how easily it’s wielded upon the young and impressionable,” NPR’s Aisha Harris said.

The movie: May December (2023)
The pairing: Julianne Moore and Charles Melton
The reaction: Here, age is the whole point. We aren’t supposed to feel comfortable about a mercurial 36-year-old, Gracie, who had a sexual relationship with her teenage co-worker, Joe, went to prison, and later married him. The movie, which follows them when Joe (Melton) is now 36 himself, transcends any simplistic rebuke by making Joe, the stunted man trapped in this off-balance marriage, its emotional center. By this point, age discourse in pop culture is practically obligatory (a Slate piece referred to the film’s story as an “age-gap romance”). “This is a man whose whole identity is founded on believing the myth that his seduction by a grown woman when he was just 13 was not only not an act of violence but a transformative experience of lasting and passionate love,” Dana Stevens wrote.

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• The Age Gappers 

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