Carol

Todd Haynes' Carol is an intelligent adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Price of Salt. As in his previous films, Haynes' transgressive protagonists attempt to transcend their repressed culture through art and love. Making love or art for Haynes' characters, be they 50s housewives or rock stars are liberating and heroic acts.

Haynes stresses the cloistered feel of 50s America: Rooney Mara is shot behind windows, grills, blinds, etc. to underline the blinkered and repressive nature of the culture she is navigating. When Cate Blanchett's Carol arrives in her life to court and spark her, Mara's shopgirl is primed for a sexual and spiritual awakening.

Haynes is unable to escape the limitations of Highsmith's novel, which is among her more one dimensional works. Carol is a larger than life figure who dwarves the stock characters around her; probably because Highsmith was gaga over the real life figure who inspired Carol. (I highly recommend Joan Schenker's biography of Ms. Highsmith) Mara, Kyle Chandler, and the rest of the cast are competent, but recede in the background as Blanchett's diva dominates the film. 

There is much to appreciate in Carol. As in Haynes' adaptation of Mildred Pierce, costumes and décor are gorgeous and add to the thematic thrust of the story: the tchotchkes and fripperies are the reward of the character's bourgeois strivings, but also the emblems of their imprisonment. 

John Magaro has a wonderful monologue right before he hits on Rooney Mara and Haynes gives his players the perfect spacing to make the moment both heartfelt and hopeless. However, he is unable to allow us to revel in his romantic pairing's flight to freedom across the American heartland. Unlike, say, Demme in Something Wild, Haynes has little feel for everyday Americana.

The coupling of Blanchett and Mara fails to generate enough electricity to allow us to share their sense of liberation and romantic fulfillment. Haynes, a cerebral filmmaker, has been able to provide moments of emotional release before. I'll never forget Richard Gere glimpsing his lost dog one last time in I'm Not There. Carol, while not quite suffering from the over-intellectualization of his Sirk pastiche Far From Heaven (Carol's cinematic twin), falls short of cinematic ecstasy. (4/19/16)