Movie Review—Carol

Carol

by Peter J. O'Connell

Carol. Released: Jan. 2016. Runtime: 118 mins. Rating: R for a scene of sexuality/nudity and brief language. 

Sometimes literature teachers will give students copies of some of the poems of Sappho of Lesbos without her name attached and ask the students to describe the poems. Some will say that they are poems from a man to a woman. Some will say that they are poems from a woman to a man. Some will say that they are poems from a man to a man. Some will say that they are poems from a woman to a woman. But all will say that they are love poems. The point of the poems is love, not the sexes/genders involved. 

This, too, is the point of Carol, a film directed by Todd Haynes from a screenplay by Phyllis Nagy, based on the novel The Price of Salt (1952) by Patricia Highsmith. It would be more accurate to title the movie Carol and Therese, for it tells the story of the relationship that emerged between these two women at a time when such a relationship was dubbed “the love that dare not speak its name.” 

It's Christmas time 1952 when Carol (Cate Blanchett) first meets Therese (Rooney Mara). Therese is a rather reserved young woman wearing a Santa elf's hat and working in a New York department store amid toys, dolls and dollhouses. (Those dollhouses should ring a bell among those familiar with the plays of Henrik Ibsen.) In a sense, Therese is herself just an elf in a workshop or a doll on a shelf. She is in a lackluster relationship with her boyfriend (Richard Semco), but doesn't know how to liven it up—or, perhaps, she may not even want to try. She also hopes to leave the department store and get a job as a photographer for a major publication, but she doesn't know how to overcome the obstacles to that goal for a woman at that time. 

For her part, Carol is a somewhat older woman, living in a well-off suburb but feeling trapped in a deteriorating marriage with her husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler). Harge loves Carol despite the fact that he believes she has tendencies to lesbianism. Both the parents have a great love for their young daughter (Sadie Heim). 

When Carol and Therese meet in the department store, both feel an attraction stirring between them. After Carol leaves something behind in the store and Therese returns it, the attraction begins to develop into a relationship. Carol sees the possibility of fulfilling desires that she has long felt but seldom acted on. Therese begins to realize that she, in fact, has desires that she has not hitherto been fully aware of. One thing leads to another, and the two women end up together on a road trip to middle America. During the course of the trip, they tenderly fulfill their now strong physical passion for each other. . However, at a motel in the quaint but ominously named town of Waterloo, Iowa, they have an encounter with a stranger (Tommy Tucker), which at first seems merely quirky but will soon become extremely important. It is so important, in fact, that it causes Carol to leave Therese behind, heartbroken in the heartland.

Carol then becomes enmeshed in divorce proceedings instituted by Harge and aimed at depriving her of custodianship of her beloved daughter—if she should have a lesbian relationship. In the meantime, Therese manages to get a job at The New York Times, but not as a photographer, just as a secretary to male journalists. Events reach a climax as Carol seeks to persuade Harge, who she feels is not really a  

cruel person, to allow her contact with her daughter, even if Carol becomes “who she really is” and enters into a lesbian relationship. And Carol desperately hopes that Therese will be willing to rekindle their love affair. Suspense mounts as Therese struggles to decide what to do about Carol's plea to reunite.

Cate Blanchett's 25-year career on stage and screen (big and small) has seen her give many outstanding performances and brought her many awards, including two Oscars. This year she has been nominated (Best Actress) for another Oscar for Carol. She richly deserves the nom, for her performance strikes just the right balance, a delicate one, between strength and vulnerability. Rooney Mara also has been nominated, as Best Supporting Actress, and she, too, richly deserves the nomination. (Her role, of course, is actually a costarring one rather than a “supporting” one.) Rooney grows, with perfect modulation, her character's arc from shyness to passion to a conflicted state about what decision to make when that choice will shape her whole future life. The rest of the cast that director Haynes has chosen is also fine, particularly Kyle Chandler as Harge. Though he causes Carol pain, Harge, as portrayed by Chandler, is not at all a villain. His own pain comes through as a motivation for his actions. 

Haynes is as well served by the cinematography of Edward Loehman as he is by his cast. The film's palette is subdued, and its framing of spaces has a constricted quality. This approach is well-suited to the theme of the film—quiet struggles against both socially and psychologically imposed limits on love. And, too, the film's excellent sense of period and place is helped by the fact that some of the scenes evoke the work of classic photographers of the time and also the paintings of Edward Hopper.

Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt was the first American novel to present a positive view of lesbianism. Highsmith, however, is even more noted for her psychological thrillers, such as Strangers on a Train (1950) and the Ripley series. (Alfred Hitchcock made a classic film noir of Strangers.) In a sense, Carol is a film noir as well as a love story. The dark genre's tropes of rainy city streets at night, flight from entrapment, dangerous chance encounters, etc., are in evidence.

Last, but definitely not least, among the things about Carol to applaud is the plaintively beautiful score by Carter Burwell.

“Footnotes” to the film: (1) Todd Haynes also directed Far From Heaven (2002), a film about a woman in the Hartford suburbs who has to deal with the belated recognition that her husband is gay. (2) Carol is set in late 1952 and early 1953, an important period in gay American history. That was when the American Psychiatric Association for the first time listed homosexuality as a mental disorder (a listing lifted in 1973). It was also the time when the federal government determined that homosexuals could not receive security clearances and should be denied or removed from jobs requiring them. (A restriction now long ended.) It was the time when the second volume of the Kinsey Report appeared. According to Kinsey, homosexual encounters were much more prevalent than commonly believed. And it was also the time when a revival of Lillian Hellman's play The Children's Hour, which has a plot involving lesbianism, appeared on Broadway to large audiences and critical acclaim. One can imagine Carol and Therese going to see it!