'Carol' A Review

Carol is a romantic melodrama set in 1952 focused on the love affair between in-progress-divorcee Carol(Cate Blanchett) and impressionable shop girl Therese(Rooney Mara). Carol goes to the department store that Therese works at to buy a Christmas gift for her daughter, she leaves her gloves at the counter which Therese returns. This begins a very restrained friendship/courtship between the two.

Blanchett gives a variant of her Blue Jasmine performance- insufferable upper-class ennui, resplendent with ticks and artificiality. Its as if more time was spent on making Blanchett immaculately groomed than believable. Mara gives a bizarrely restrained performance, so vacant and unresponsive its almost as if her character is on the autism spectrum. There are innumerable silences and alternatively longing and desirous looks and certainly the two leads share a lot of screen time but all of this means little given the characters aren't actually developed. All the men are lumbering over-the-top and covetous and not only do all the women have virtually no agency they can't or don't express their feelings.

All the performances verge on unsympathetic caricature but that could be a fault of the script. It languishes in its restraint and repression so much it lacks emotion. There are so many shots of dirty/fogged windows any intended metaphor is lost in the monotony. The twists and conflict lack any weight because we do not know or care about the characters, their reactions are almost illogical given we know nothing about them and the fact the initial story takes place over a matter of days.

The production design is immaculate- the sets, the cars, the cloths. But most evocative of the time period is the regressive gender roles. On paper the film is a lesbian love story but there is something disquieting about the repeated archetype of the controlling man and the woman without recourse that may serve to reinforce rather than subvert. Although the film espouses to be a story about homosexuality in a time when it was ostracized this is undermined by the pristine heterosexual image of glamour and beauty personified(with great care) by Blanchett and Mara, it is further undermined by their relationship's lack of clarity and emotional articulation. Even their love scene is characterized by heterosexual convention.

In a year with the poignant and playful Tangerine and the less successful albeit contemporary Freeheld among others Carol recalls a time period and societal constraints that deserve no revisit.

Progressive in concept, regressive in execution.

Don't See It.