Few actors could possibly convey as much complexity with a line like "Shall I pay you now?" as Cate Blanchett does as Carol Aird, the wealthy socialite in Todd Haynes' new movie, Carol.
Blanchett delivers this line barely 10 minutes into the movie to Therese Belivet ( Rooney Mara ), a would-be photographer working as a temp sales girl in the toy area of a large department store. The period is the repressive 1950s and, in the brief moment Carol and Therese chat ( as the mink draped Carol contemplates a doll but instead buys a train set for her daughter for Christmas—at Therese's suggestion ), it's clear that the connection between these two women is electric and we are at the onset of a grand passion.
Carol's deep chest tones when she delivers that line is like the opening salvo in a romantic drama so deep, so drenched in unfettered desire underneath all the forcibly stifled emotion and conscripted daily life that was the norm for Our People in that stultifying era, that one nearly has to take a moment afterward to learn to breathe normally again.
Carol is erotically charged alright, but it also has you gasping with fear with each second as the two women slowly but inexorably and gingerly navigate their way around society and men to a physically and emotionally intimate union. Carol is going through a tricky divorce from Harge, her hard-drinking playboy husband ( a very fine Kyle Chandler ) who is besotted with feeling for her, while Therese ( "Tur-ez" ) is being pestered into an engagement by a persistent, eager beau ( Jake Lacy ) so dull his name should be Wonder Bread instead of Richard. Harge is holding a previous lesbian love affair with Carol's friend Abby ( Sarah Paulson, arch and wised-up, like a quasi-Eve Arden ) over her head and suing for full custody of their daughter based on moral grounds, threatening to expose Carol's proclivities.
To escape hideous pressure and the mounting invasion of privacy, Carol invites Therese to go on a road trip with her over the holidays. As the trip progresses west toward Chicago, the romance intensifies, but so does the ominous nature of the film—the careful happiness the women share in private is almost always countered by the prying eyes surrounding them. Everywhere, men act as if the women were their possessions to be controlled at their whim, while women expect them to toe the line. Outside forces seem to match the intensity of the affair but, like the novel it springs from, the film takes us in a surprisingly modern direction as it moves toward its conclusion. This direction—which must have been read as wish fulfillment by both author and many readers at the time—is all the more powerful when seen through our modern eyes, so filled with copious amounts of queer imagery that we take them for granted.
Not so openly gay director Todd Haynes has always had a special affinity for queer characters placed in the rigid past. ( His 2003 masterpiece Far From Heaven is like part one of a trilogy with Carol being part two; I can't wait for part three. ) Haynes, the most renowned director of the New Queer Cinema movement of the early '90s, has also drawn one exquisite performance after another from his actresses.
His rapport with Julianne Moore is legendary and this, his second film with Cate Blanchett ( she was Oscar nominated playing Bob Dylan in a nice bit of cross-gender role playing in his Dylan homage I'm Not There ), is no less impressive. Mara's Therese, tentative but strong as steel underneath, compliments Blanchett's deeply conflicted Carol, who seems drawn from a Douglas Sirk melodrama. ( She has the weight on her shoulders that Susan Hayward or Lana Turner would recognize. ) Working from a script by Phyllis Nagy, adapted from the long cherished lesbian classic novel The Price of Salt, by Patricia Highsmith, Haynes works with his longtime cameraman Edward Lachman to gorgeously re-create the period in soft pastels while contrasting them with the occasional vivid color. Red, especially, is used as a badge of courage in this oppressive world ( designating Carol as a scarlet woman and, later, Therese, too ).
Everything in this repressive world—it's like a 1950s version of Bent, or something—is coded so that the "subterranean" people can read each other's thoughts just by noting a certain object of clothing, accessory and, most especially, a well-timed glance. To see such a passionate story play out against the backdrop of this insulated world is thrilling. And you realize from the first moment ( in which we glimpse Carol and Therese in a bar at what we think is the end of their story ) that we are viewing one of those films that audiences—and certainly jaded film critics—silently wait for in earnest.
These are movies in which the director's talent and technique meld so seamlessly that we know that we are witnessing an instant classic. Part of you stands outside the movie as you watch it—admiring it for its sheer genius. These are films like Hitchcock's Rear Window, Fleming's The Wizard of Oz, Minnelli's The Band Wagon, Welles' Citizen Kane, Coppola's Godfather Part II, Spielberg's Jaws, Mankiewicz's All About Eve and several more. Haynes' Carol stands with these movies. It is, in short, cinematic perfection; for movie audiences of any persuasion, that is indeed a rarity.
For Our People, it's, well … bliss. Carol is a movie that has been a long time coming—this is Brokeback Mountain with the happy ending. It contains a truth that has been denied queer people on the screen pretty much forever: A lot of gay men and women managed to carve out happy lives for themselves within the insane constrictions of society at large. That aunt's best friend, that uncle's "roommate," that father's letters from his college roommate you found in a shoebox after he died—we knew that they were gay and at times happily coupled behind closed doors; and we've known that it's been this way since time immemorial for the famous and the everyday folks who are and were just like us.
Slowly, the world is catching on to this, too ( and here is where an organization like The Legacy Project is helping to fill such a huge void ). Watching Carol from a queer perspective is like witnessing an unearthed artifact of queer culture that one dreamed of but never hoped to see. Here's hoping this rapturous movie opens the floodgate to dozens more like it.
