Was anyone progressive and cool enough to write about lesbian relationships in the conformity-embracing climate of the early 1950s? Yes, Patricia Highsmith (‘Strangers on a Train,’ ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’) was, which is just the sort of thing you’d imagine capturing the interest of filmmaker Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine). Carol is his adaptation of Highsmith’s 1952 novel ‘The Price of Salt,’ in which an unhappy housewife named Carol (Cate Blanchett) indulges in a lesbian dalliance with a pretty young shop girl named Therese (Rooney Mara) during the final stages of separation from her wealthy husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler). Carol is quaffed, mysterious, and enchanting, and Therese is young, spun-around, and trying to figure out what kind of woman she wants to be. This being the 50s, things aren’t going to be easy for either of them.
The reason to see Carol is that it’s ridiculously pretty to look at. The exhaustive work of costumer Sandy Powell and production designer Judy Becker teams with the work of probably about a thousand other artists to create an immersive, expansive journey into a romantic and idealized version of the early 50s. Haynes and his cinematographer Edward Lachman’s decision to shoot the film on Super 16mm rather than 35 mm or digital lends their images a fuzzy, tactile graininess that separates the film visually from any other recent release. Carol is rich and warm and layered—the kind of movie that you feel like you could reach out and touch, or even wrap yourself up in like a blanket—and when that aesthetic gets paired with the gloss and glamour of the period-set production design, the results are a viewing experience that has the emotional resonance of flipping through a cherished old photo album that belonged to your grandmother.
The other thing the film does well is make you feel the tension and anxiety that comes from being different in a culture that doesn’t have much room in it for difference. How does someone who’s attracted to members of the same gender pursue a same-sex relationship in a society that doesn’t want to admit that such a thing exists by being anything other than a complete radical? And what if that someone doesn’t want to be a radical, the sort of person who rages against a system, and they want to just be left alone to do their own thing? Good luck with that. Cultural values develop with a momentum that puts pressure on even the smallest actions that don’t line up with the established norms. Throw sex into the equation and things get heated, and, even worse, too interesting for those who love to stick their noses in other people’s business to pass up. These days most straight people know someone who’s gay, and they have a bit of insight into the bullshit that they have to deal with on a daily basis, but can any of us imagine what they endured during the Norman Rockwell delusion of the early 50s? Usually probably not, but Carol does the magic trick of giving us a little insight anyway.
If you want to pinpoint where the film starts to feel iffy, you can begin by looking at the performances. Mara is engaging and relatable as the shop girl trying to find her way in the world, all the way through, and Blanchett is magnetic and alluring as the poised and put together older woman who the young girl projects all of her wishes and desires onto, but unfortunately that’s only Carol’s status for the first half of the film, and Blanchett’s cold, detached performance fails to open up as her character gets developed. As Therese and Carol’s relationship blossoms, we learn more about the older woman—more about her romantic history, her failed marriage, and the ups and downs of her attempts at motherhood—but Blanchett never lets us inside the character so that we can understand which of her feelings are genuine, or why she makes the choices that she makes. She flies off the handle when things don’t go her way, swinging instantly from shivery cool to fiery passion, but we’re never made to understand how her two extremes of emotion make for a character who exists as a compelling whole.
Early on in the film Carol remarks to Therese, “What a strange girl you are. Flung out of space,” but because of Blanchett’s alienating screen presence, it’s the Carol character who really seems to have been sent here from another planet. This disconnect we experience with the title character takes a turn for the worse in the third act, where Therese can disappear for huge stretches of time while we’re asked to take Carol on as our point of view character and actually care about how her divorce proceedings and custody battle are going to hash out. Because we don’t truly understand the character, or know how she really feels under all of her carefully created layers of artifice, it’s hard to be invested in large portions of the film’s climax. It’s possible that Cate Blanchett was just too Cate Blanchetty for this role.
Never does this theory look more true than in the love scene shared by the two female leads. Maybe Blanchett is such a tightly wound performer that filming a sex scene just isn’t in her bag of tricks, or maybe she was so uncomfortable being physical with another woman that she couldn’t make it look natural for the camera, but never before has a scene that was supposed to be about barely contained passion fell so flat. Never before in a scene that was supposed to be about a longed for connection finally being made have two mouths so repeatedly failed to connect. Blanchett was able to generate far more heat in the scenes that she shared with Chandler, and in those the goal was to project disgust and a boiling over of a long-simmering rage. As a piece of visual art Carol triumphs, and as a piece of sexual politics it does okay, but as a love story, that’s where it unfortunately falters.
