Allow to me get straight to the heart of the matter: Carol is a masterpiece.
Based on the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt, it is the story of a young photographer, Therese (Rooney Mara), questioning her identity in 1952 New York and finding the answer in the form of Carol (Cate Blanchett), an older, wealthy New Jersey homemaker in the midst of an ugly custody battle with her soon-to-be ex-husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler). Carol the film, much like Carol the character, is an enigma in the utmost. It is a constantly shifting thing, with subtext and coded language in places one wouldn’t even think to look, all in the hands of a creative ensemble whose work is delivered with a precision I would be willing to call unprecedented in recent cinema. Not a word, frame, glance, gesture is out of place. In one moment, I found myself brought near tears simply by Rooney Mara’s articulation of the word “yes.” Indeed, the performances of its leading ladies are nothing short of supernatural, particularly in the case of Mara.
Carol succeeds where so many other LGBT films fail in that it is not the story of homosexuality versus homophobia. The world Carol and Therese occupy is certainly a hostile one to their true selves, but is never portrayed as the “ism” it so often is, nor given the equal weight in storytelling that bogs down its contemporaries such as Freeheld. We, the audience, are here for and because of this love story. We are engaged and enraptured because we understand early on that these two people, for reasons never stated outright but are nonetheless there, must, must be together. Carol and Therese are the foreground, they are the story, and the obstacles they face in the personal manifestations of society’s hostility are treated as the means to resolution and catharsis, not the reason we are here. In this way, Haynes has somehow given us a period love story that may in fact be the most modern piece of representation the lesbian community has seen (outside perhaps, Blue is the Warmest Color, but I’ve said my piece on that subject).
That said, the film to me is ultimately a meditation on the private, internal lives of women, independent of sexuality. Through every element of mise-en-scene (particularly the costumes of Sandy Powell and Production Design of Judy Becker) Haynes and his creative colleagues create a world entrenched in the feminine. The motifs of lipstick, perfume, and what feels like almost every scene shot through panes of glass, make this a film not only about feminine love, but the men (including Haynes) who so determinedly seek to infiltrate and access the oceans beneath the measured surfaces of the women in their lives.
Carol and Therese are each tasked with finding ways to explain themselves to their respective male companions without actually explaining themselves at all. Carol to her ex-husband Harge, and Therese to her pleasant, if highly presumptuous boyfriend, Richard (Jake Lacy). Harge believes he has Carol figured out, and that her sexuality is a subject on which he can convince her otherwise, but when he discovers the extent of her relationship with Therese, he realizes it is an unchangeable truth. Yet rather than be a symbol of a bigoted society, he is a man who simply wants his wife to love him, and will punish her for not doing so in the only way he is sure he can. But he does this out of heartbreak, not hatred.
Richard, on the other hand, is less complex. His bothersome naivete is matched by Therese’s frustration with his unwillingness to see her for who and what she really is – as a person, not necessarily a lesbian. He has bought her a boat ticket for a trip to Paris which she never asked for, he invites her to Christmas with his family which she finds inappropriate, and he has asked her to marry him multiple times, never to be met with a response. For being the mysterious creature she is, Therese’s struggle is to make Richard see the obviousness of her total lack of feeling for him, never mind what lies beneath.
This personal, independent struggle of both lovers to explain the inexplicable (to their men and themselves), is juxtaposed by the silent understanding held among all three women at the center of the film (Carol, Therese, and Abbie, Carol’s best friend and former lover played by a wondrous Sarah Paulson). They speak in code, through glances, gestures, hardly ever in words. When the moment at last arrives for Carol and Therese to give way to their feelings, even then do they remain unspoken. It is a moment of connection that exists on that plane of womanhood and secrecy where they connected the instant they met, and leads to a scene that is tender, erotic, and staggeringly romantic. Indeed, there is but one declaration of love in the entire film, and is presented in an unaffected, matter-of-fact statement. Upon reflection, I see that the entire film itself is a similarly quiet declaration: of love, honesty, and gratitude to those mysterious, secret individuals of that time who, in their own private ways, resisted the adversity around them and paved the way for what occurred on June 26th of this year.
During a Q&A session following the screening at the Chicago International Film Festival, Todd Haynes told the story of when he and Cate Blanchett viewed the first cut of the film. He said that there was one scene that brought her to tears: a moment between Sarah Paulson and Rooney Mara, where Abbie is driving Therese across the country back to New York, after fate and conflict has wrested our lovers apart. Abbie adjusts her rear-view mirror to look sympathetically back at Therese, who has clearly cried herself to sleep, resting in the backseat. In this look, Haynes said, Ms. Blanchett understood what it must have felt like for these women and the larger gay community at that time. All they had was each other, and even now, in an age where monumental progress has been made, there will never be a way to overstate the value of that unique camaraderie of same recognizing same, but I very much doubt it will ever be said more beautifully than by Todd Haynes through this, his masterpiece.
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