Just in time for award season Carol is the Cirque inspired Hayes directed lesbian Christmas
love story you didn't know you needed. Why do you need it? I'm Leslie Combemale, Cinema
Siren, and this is my review.
Maybe you'd like to visit me sometime. You're welcome to. At least there's some pretty country
around where I live. Would you like to come and visit me this sunday? Yes. What a strange
girl you are. Why? Flung out of space.
Carol is the cinematic version of the bold seminal 1952 lesbian romance novel The Price
of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (who wrote Strangers on a Train), from a screenplay by Phyllis
Nagy. The book is known as the first famous gay novel with a relatively uplifting ending.
No one dies, or turns appropriately straight in the end, for example.
Shopgirl Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara) and socialite Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) are
immediately drawn to each other. They meet in the department store where Therese works
during the holidays, when she helps Carol searching for a Christmas gift for her young
daughter. The story of their budding relationship, and the challenges it brings to them as individuals
in the homophobic atmosphere of 1950s New York unfolds with all its beauty, poignancy,
and sadness, over the 118 minutes of screen time.
Director Todd Haynes has proven himself capable of this kind of story telling with 2002’s
Far From Heaven. With Carol, he reaffirms himself as the cinematic heir of classic Hollywood
melodrama auteur Douglas Sirk, whose visually stylized films focused on the hypocrisies
of American domestic life and the oppressive nature of forced conformity. Here Haynes turns
his lens to the history of being gay in the 50s through the cinematization of the novel,
although the film is far more about desire, yearning, and choosing to be true to oneself,
regardless of the cost, and therefore has a far more universal appeal than simply an
entrant into contemporary queer cinema. There is also a subversive quality to the fact that
in the 1950s, there isn’t yet a language or understanding of what being gay looked
like, and as such allows the characters to discover for themselves what being gay means.
Visually lush, gorgeously photographed, deliciously costumed by Sandy Powell, and, above all,
exquisitely acted, Carol should be seen and appreciated widely this holiday and awards
season.
Rooney Mara won a Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival, and the story is seen through
her eyes, but both she and Kate Blanchett are, in their own way, leads in the film.
With a 16 year difference in age, it is somewhat a May-September romance. Both actresses make
nuanced use of the elements of that dynamic at play, as well as the fundamental differences
in personality and positions of class. Kyle Chandler as Harge Aird, Carol’s husband,
carries the weight of playing the oppressive self-righteous husband, and does so with a
spot-on subtle self assurance. Sarah Paulson as Carol’s friend Abby Gerhard lends an
authenticity to the outsider role, although for fans, is seen too little on the screen.
Screenwriter Nagy says the story is about how truth is the ultimate tonic…that if
you are emotionally truthful to who you are and what you believe it, good things may not
happen, but you’ll still become a better person. Certainly, Nagy’s screenplay and
Haynes’s direction allow these characters good arcs and a rich interior lives. The actors
embrace that in their memorable, nuanced portrayals.