Carol

Carol is the first non-mystery novel by Patricia Highsmith to be made into a film. Highsmith, the celebrated author of psychological thrillers like Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and The Two Faces of January, originally titled her second novel The Price of Salt and published it in 1952 under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, due to its then-controversial content. When she reissued the book in 1990 under her own name, she changed the title to Carol.  Like the book, the film is set in New York during the ‘50s and tells of a protracted lesbian romance between an inexperienced young woman Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara) and an older, worldlier married woman Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), who is in the process of separating from her husband Harge (Kyle Chandler). 

It’s difficult to think of a better team to bring this story to the screen than Phyllis Nagy and Todd Haynes. Nagy, a theater and movie director and dramatist, was a friend of Highsmith when the author was in her later years. Indie filmmaker Haynes (Poison, Safe, The Velvet Goldmine), in addition to being one of the founders of the New Queer Cinema movement in the 1990s, has distinguished himself as a skilled director of women in pictures such as Safe (1995), Far From Heaven (2002), and his five-hour HBO miniseries adaptation of James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce (2011). But while this pairing yields a solid result, Carol doesn’t fully capture the sensations that get under your skin when you read Highsmith’s work.

The novelist’s best film translators, like Anthony Minghella, Whitfield Cook, and Czenzi Ormonde, take important liberties with her material to make it cinematic.  For Carol, Nagy also makes some bold, logical decisions that eliminate the book’s single, subjective point of view and substitute an alternating look at both of the two women and their lives, as events unfold.  Though the story is still primarily told from the perspective of the young woman, Therese, Nagy transforms Carol from a mysterious and seemingly unknowable apparition, as she is in the novel, into a full-bodied character with her own narrative arc. Unfortunately, Blanchett’s interpretation of Carol is more suited to the distant, dreamlike character in the novel than the fleshed-out woman of this movie. Blanchett’s Carol is all cool surface beauty and elegance with an underlying fire that is only hinted at.  Mara, on the other hand, delivers an astonishingly complex and empathetic performance as the inexperienced Therese. We see all the insecurity, fear, curiosity, and desire behind her piercing eyes. She is able to communicate these unspoken emotions so well that it becomes frustrating that Nagy and Haynes felt the need to put great amounts of unnecessary explanatory dialogue into her mouth.

Carol is a strikingly beautiful movie. Haynes and his team evoke New York in the 1950s with the authenticity of antiquarian photographs, not the mummified sterility of museum displays—a major problem with this year’s dismissible Trumbo and far too many other recent period pictures.   Cinematographer Edward Lachman (Desperately Seeking Susan, Light Sleeper, Erin Brockovich) shot the film on Super-16mm, which baths the images in a high grain that softens the bright colors and deep blacks of the costumes and production design. Like Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, Ben Affleck’s Argo, and Haynes’ own Far From Heaven, the look of Carol feels utterly accurate to the era in which the story takes place. However, this striking, perceptible illusion of authenticity is not enough to make a movie great.

Despite the passion lurking within the film’s two repressed protagonists, Carol is a cold picture that keeps at arm’s length the emotions it purports to explore. Unlike Far From Heaven—a film that not only pays note-perfect homage to the 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk but also brilliantly imagines what a Sirk picture might be like if the director had been able to delve into topics prohibited in his day by the Motion Picture Production Code—Carol recreates an era but doesn’t examine the time in both an emotional and cinematic way.  A story about a young woman falling in love with an older woman that doesn’t end with both protagonists dead, or punished by society in some horrific way, was nearly impossible to find, even in print, back in 1952, and it was certainly not to be seen on American movie screens. But this film keeps us at too much of a distance to fully enter the world of its characters. We get too distracted admiring the images and surface details to fully empathize with Therese and Carol (or Carol’s husband and young daughter for that matter) from moment to moment. 

Carol is the type of story reviewers often proclaim could only be told as a period piece because nowadays if a woman left her husband for another woman it would be a simple decision, which would happen without all the angst, ennui, and drama of a forbidden love story from the ‘50s. But this perception is a gross oversimplification. One could just as easily say that this tale would be all the more fascinating if told in modern times, because a contemporary mother going through a custody battle like the one the consumes the second half of this story would place her children’s needs at the forefront of her life. A mother in a present-day movie of this sort could not treat her child like a prop, as Carol often does, because the child would be the most precious aspect of her life. Much of this film’s dramatic narrative centers on the fight between Carol and Harge over their daughter. But neither Blanchett’s performance nor Nagy’s script expose what the little girl really means to Carol. The title character remains too elusive to carry as much of the film’s emotional weight as she’s required to in this adaptation. 

It is odd to complain about Cate Blanchett’s acting. Apart from her hammy star turn in Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) and her embarrassing appearance as the ill-conceived Nazi villainess in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), she is one of the finest actresses of the past two decades. Ironically, my favorite Blanchett performance is in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), in which she plays the one major character that does not appear in Highsmith’s book. But in Carol, every time Mara is off screen and we’re left with Blanchett and the supporting players, the delicate spell the film casts on us is broken. All the actors turn in fine, admirable performances, but only Mara’s reaches past the mind to touch the heart.