While Carol is an absolutely beautiful film in terms of cinematography and production design—scene after scene makes you want to pause it and just admire—it is primarily surface, as if Haynes were fearful of digging beneath all the perfectly evoked period décor. It’s a strange turn of events since Haynes has mined this territory to great effect before, in 2002’s Far From Heaven, which used the period trappings and visual style of Douglas Sirk melodramas to dramatize the hypocrisies of social norms and the complexities of love in its many forms. Writing nearly 15 years ago about that film, I noted that Haynes had truly “found his voice” and that the film’s real achievement was that “it stirs our hearts and also conveys important messages about the embedded social nature of racism and homophobia without being preachy or didactic.” While Carol also avoids being preachy, it fails to stir the heart, which renders it a gorgeous, but relatively stultifying exercise in style.

Following Highsmith’s novel fairly closely, the film, which is set in 1952, tracks the growing relationship between Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), a wealthy New Jersey housewife who is in the midst of a divorce from her alpha-male husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler), and Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), an aspiring young photographer who is working at a department store in Manhattan. The title of the film (which is also the title of Highsmith’s novel after it was republished in 1990) would seem to suggest that Blanchett’s character is the protagonist, but this is really Therese’s story, as she is the character who must change. Highsmith’s novel made this clear by narrating from Therese’s perspective, but Nagy’s screenplay tries to split the difference by making it equally about both women, which doesn’t work because Carol is relatively unchanging. Having already had a sexual relationship with a woman, her best friend Abby (Sarah Paulson), and being in full understanding and acceptance of her sexual attraction to women (although she must, by social necessity, keep it largely hidden), she is in a sense what Therese needs to become, which requires Therese to overcome both her own inarticulateness about what she wants in life and a social environment that represses any notions of same-sex attraction.

Unfortunately, Mara, who is made up to look like Audrey Hepburn at the height of her popularity in the mid-1950s, fails to convey the psychological complexities inherent in Highsmith’s prose, instead opting to look winsome, lost, and fragile (Haynes’s favored composition is her looking wistfully out a window smeared with rain, snow, and/or reflected lights), thus literalizing her interpersonal confusion. Blanchett’s performance is just as problematic, as she plays up Carol’s social opulence via a haughty Gloria Swanson impersonation that feels utterly contrived. Of course, Carol the character is playing a role, and her behavioral tics and continental enunciations could just be her social armor, but Blanchett rarely lets us see beneath it. There are a few scenes in which she hints at the character’s vulnerability, particularly a scene where she meets with her lawyer who does everything but come out and say that she may lose custody of her young daughter because she is a lesbian.

The lengths to which characters go to avoid saying “lesbian” or “homosexual” is indicative of an era that castigated such desire without question, and when the film works, it is when we sense the genuine agony felt by Carol and Therese at having to live beneath a veil, constantly pretending to be other than they are. However, the film doesn’t work as a whole because Blanchett’s haughtiness and Mara’s wide-eyed ingenuity are pitched too high, which squelches the more complex and interesting feelings and fears and joys that would make a story like this work. It’s gorgeous to look at, but strangely unmoving.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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