I scrawled these words in my notebook before swooning home from Carol, Todd Haynes’s consummate braiding of social diagnosis and emotional catharsis. Weather aside, there is something irreducibly cold about the world inhabited by Rooney Mara’s Therese Belivet, a shopgirl and aspiring photographer in early-Fifties Manhattan, and by Cate Blanchett’s Carol Aird, a well-to-do suburban homemaker. Carol’s impending divorce gets messier once her husband cites a vague "morality clause" in petitioning for custody of their daughter. Therese, whose boyfriend keeps pushing romantic trips and long-term commitments, finds that beginnings and middles of relationships can be as disorienting as conclusions. The two women meet, differently unprepared for the passion they soon feel for each other.
While capturing the chill of inhibited longings and New York winters, Carol chips away at its own shimmering surface, evoking the violence often required, toward oneself and toward others, to attain self-knowledge. The script, images, and performances all reveal sharp edges. At the same time, Carol is uncommonly delicate. Insights into character and theme feel diffused across the frame, not bundled into discrete objects or neat speeches. Haynes is too precise a semiotician to mount anything "timeless," but even the piece’s most contemporary concerns-with sexism and sexuality, inchoate ambition, and alternative social arrangements, blend fully into its vision of mid-century malaise, as inseparable as the dancer from the dance, the red from the petal.
Elegant but thorny, Carol is the work of a director who has thought through every angle of his material. But whereas Safe (95), Velvet Goldmine (98), and Far from Heaven (02) translate such thinking into bold metafilmic spectacle, Carol finds Haynes standing at zero distance from the material, which is derived for the first time from someone else’s script, in this case written by Phyllis Nagy. While subduing his voice on screen somewhat, he is at no loss for words when asked about his latest feat.
That’s hard, because they fall into categories: the melodramas, which are typically women’s stories, and the more exuberant, eccentrically structured films about musical artists. But I will say Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story [87], because in some crazy way it encompasses all those elements in my very first outing. It deals with questions about narrative, the subject, and identity, together with a take on pop culture in a particular historical framework. So that film brings all those concerns of mine into a tight, containable package.
Honestly, I was not even familiar with [Patricia] Highsmith’s novel when the script came to me. But what I immediately responded to was that it was a film about sexuality and gay or lesbian themes, all of which I’d dealt with in earlier films, even within the Fifties—but this was a different take on those subjects, which is what I’d been looking for.
The novel and Phyllis’s beautiful adaptation are such powerful love stories, and raised questions for me about how "the love story" in movies differs from the domestic dramas or melodramas I’ve looked at in the past. Plus, I was interested in the isolation of the desiring subject, who’s more in love, who’s more liable to be hurt by the object of desire, in this case, Rooney’s character, Therese. In the novel, you’re placed entirely in her point of view. The first draft I read of Phyllis’s script opened it up, giving us somewhat equal access to Carol’s side, where all the most dramatic material really resides, whereas Therese is just this young woman coming into focus, even to herself. There was something so strong about the entrapment you felt in the book of being stuck with Therese inside her own consciousness. I was really moved by that and wanted to bring some of that feeling back into the film.
I also saw a direct line from the overproductive mental states of all the criminals in Highsmith’s other novels to the romantic imagination, in its constant state of hyperproduction, conjuring scenarios and outcomes, getting overwhelmed by all the signs it’s trying to read, trying to determine whether the person you love feels any need to be close to you. That craziness, that loneliness, that paranoia, but also the pleasure of reading everything, to the point of total distraction from everything else, I found to be such a great premise.
Obviously one of the movies that influenced Carol was David Lean and Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter, with its methods for binding you to a character but also that structural doubling. In the beginning, the lovers are introduced as background figures whom you slowly realize will become the central players, especially the Celia Johnson character, who is its ultimate subject. Then you travel back as she recalls the entire experience of meeting Trevor Howard’s character, then you come full circle and return to that opening and discover what it was really about and what was at stake.
In Carol, toward the end, when you come back to the scene in the Ritz Hotel, Therese has been hurt, and has developed defenses and survival mechanisms to endure this experience she went through with Carol. So Therese’s disappointment is now the object of Carol’s reevaluation, as is the meaning of this young girl within Carol’s own life. We come back, then, not just to experience that scene a second time, but to do so from another character’s perspective.
That tension is being carefully developed throughout the course of the story, leading up to the question of how they will eventually hook up, and when, or even, will they?