Carol feels like an old film. It is set in the America of the
late fifties, but that is not what makes it anachronistic, but rather it’s
belief that the audiences watching it are stuck in that time period. We're not.
Not to say that its a bad film. Carol
has a lot going for it, in particular the very detailed and beautiful
photography and amazing production and costume design, enhanced by the two
gorgeous actresses that play the title roles, Cate Blanchet, as Carol, and Rooney Mara, as Therese, now both candidates for an Academy Award for their performances.
The trouble
with the movie is that it suffers from what I will call the Brokeback Mountain syndrome, which is
that while supposedly addressing the issue of homosexuality through a love
affair in a place (Brokeback) or time
period (Carol) in which the
discrimination against those relationships was extreme, in order to call out
that discrimination, it does so almost apologetically, directed at a straight
audience, as if it were trying to “sell” the love affair to straight folk. In
the process of doing this it sacrifices reality.
Cate Blanchet as Carol |
This approach
starts with the fact that both films use straight actors to play people of a
different sexual orientation. The audience knows this because we live in a
world of instant information, so it somehow already detracts from the
subversive intent of a film that is trying to show the fluidity of
sexuality. Wouldn’t the beautiful Jodie Foster or Portia De Rossi been a better
casting choice in Ms. Blanchet’s role? And Rooney Mara could easily have been
played by Ellen Paige or even Kristen Stewart, who showed much more realism
with a gay role in Clouds of Sils Maria
(also about the relationship between an older woman and a young gay woman). They most
likely would have brought more realism to the roles but, more than that, isn’t
the point to offer these roles to actors that are probably looking to expand
the landscape?
This is really
an oddity, considering that Carol director,
Todd Haynes, is identified with the New Queer Cinema movement. Haynes has
addressed sexual identity and societal norms in other of his films, like Far From Heaven, Poison and Safe.
But since gay
actors can and do play straight characters, why not have straight actors play gay people, even though, in this
case, the gay relationship is at the center of the plot? So, let’s leave that
aside. The next faux pas of the movie
is the relationship of the main protagonists itself. Does anyone really believe
in love at first sight? Is that romantic at all in the twenty-first century? Or
are we to assume that this is what happened among gay women in that time
period? Watching Carol you can’t help but think: who behaves like that? What
adults seriously fall in love at first sight and with literally no context beyond their good looks, they turn their lives inside out. Even if we accept that the sexual magnetism was strong, the movie never really develops anything else. There is never any complexity
in the relationship between Carol and Therese. That may have passed muster in
those Hollywood films of old that no one (not even back then) really believed,
but in the twenty-first century of Supreme Court rulings and a stronger
movement towards gender equity, it is hard to swallow.
And while both
Ms. Blanchet and Ms. Mara, who have more than proven their value as superb
actresses, are good in their roles, there is really nothing that extraordinary
about their acting. That is, nothing like how we’ve seen them act before, for
example Ms. Blanchet in Elizabeth I
or Ms. Mara in Girl With a Dragoon Tattoo. Unless, again as was the case with Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback, the award is for acting like
a homosexual person in a love relationship.
Finally there
is the very contrived plot in this screen adaptation. Carol, played by Ms.
Blanchet, is about to lose custody of the child she supposedly loves
profoundly, yet when the drunken husband takes away her daughter and threatens
to file for full custody, does she follow in another car to make sure her child
is all right? Does she call him back to negotiate and get him to come to his
senses? Does she even try to see her daughter? No, she picks up her suitcase
then gets Therese, the much younger woman she has fallen in love-at-first-sight
with, played by Ms. Mara, and goes on a road trip! She’s seen this woman all of
two times, one for less than five minutes. So, this is love?
Despite the
mink coats and money Carol obviously possesses, the road trip they take is to
the worst little towns and motels possible in the Midwest, and in winter! And yet
still they somehow manage to get caught on tape in the process. In the end
(spoiler alert), Carol cedes custody of the child she loves in exchange for the
young woman she barely knows but apparently loves more. Is this really a happy
ending?
Could it be
that even though the director is gay, he is a man and so this all appears
plausible to him? What did the author of the book intend as the happy ending? The
book on which Carol is based, “The Price of Salt” by Patricia Highsmith (author
of other novels taken to the big screen, like Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, or Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley), may answer some of the questions raised. Ms.
Highsmith is rather legendary for having been a person who did not like people
much and who, despite being gay herself, discriminated against black people and
was outspokenly anti-Semitic. She did not have long term relationships or
children, and was described as rather cruel and harsh. An anecdote, it seems she lived with cats and about three hundred snails in her garden in England and
once took hundreds of snails in a handbag to a cocktail party saying they were
her "companions for the evening".
Most of the
audience will know little of this and will remember only Mr. Haynes adaptation,
which is, again, captivating in its visual beauty, with its old Hollywood-style
actresses in a romance –a gay romance- story with a happy ending. All very
straight and acceptable, but not very real.
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