Todd Haynes opens Carol on a city street at night, where a man crosses toward a waiting car and a hand rests on a shoulder. That hand belongs to Cate Blanchett, and the film that follows spends 118 minutes explaining why the gesture lands the way it does.
Trailer, via Film4.
A Glove Left on the Counter
The setup is small and exact. During the Christmas season of 1952, Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara) works the counter at Frankenberg’s department store in Manhattan. Carol Aird walks in looking for a doll for her daughter, Rindy, and leaves with a model train set instead, on Therese’s recommendation. Then Carol leaves her gloves behind.
Therese mails them back using the Frankenberg’s sales slip with Carol’s name and address. That errand is the whole engine of the film. Carol calls the store to thank her, and asks her to lunch.
Haynes and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy, working from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, never rush the two women toward each other. Therese has a boyfriend, Richard (Jake Lacy), who wants her to move to France and marry him. She is not sure. Carol has a husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler), and a divorce already in progress.
Harge, Abby and the Morality Clause
The obstacle is not the age gap. It is the custody fight.
Harge learns that Carol had an affair years earlier with her friend Abby (Sarah Paulson), and he starts watching Therese with the same suspicion. He petitions a judge to consider a morality clause against Carol, threatening to expose her relationship with women and take full custody of Rindy. That threat is what sends Carol and Therese out of New York on a road trip.
This is where Carol does its sharpest work. The film is not about whether the romance is real. It is about what the romance costs, and who gets to decide.
Edward Lachman Shoots on Super 16
Carol looks like something recovered rather than something made. Cinematographer Edward Lachman shot it on Super 16 mm film, and the grain does real labor here. Faces are soft at the edges. Interiors carry the flat, warm light of a department store at Christmas.
Haynes has made period films before, and the temptation in a 1950s New York story is to turn the past into a display case. He does not. The camera stays close, and the clothes and the cars stay background.
The production itself took a long road to get here. Nagy wrote the first draft of the screenplay in 1997. Film4 Productions and its then-chief executive Tessa Ross financed development. The project sat in development hell for years, tangled in financing, rights, scheduling conflicts and accessibility.
Number 9 Films joined as a producer in 2011, when Elizabeth Karlsen secured the rights to the novel. Killer Films, the New York company, came on in 2013 after Haynes’s collaborator Christine Vachon approached him to direct. Principal photography started in March 2014 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and ran 34 days.
Blanchett, Mara and What the Camera Notices
Blanchett plays Carol as a woman who has already decided something and is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. Mara’s Therese is the opposite: an aspiring photographer who has not decided anything, and who watches everyone.
That pairing is the film’s best argument. Therese takes candid photographs of Carol at her New Jersey home, stopping to buy a Christmas tree on the way. The camera in Therese’s hands and the camera in Haynes’s hands are doing the same thing — noticing.
Carol later gives Therese a suitcase with a Canon camera and film inside. It is a gift, and it is also a transfer of power.
The Road Trip and the Break
The middle stretch slows down. The road trip is quieter than the setup, and the film risks losing momentum there. It does not, but the tension moves from the apartment to the hotel and stays low.
The supporting cast does steady work without much room. Chandler makes Harge petty rather than monstrous, which is harder. Paulson’s Abby is the film’s most interesting side character, a woman who lost Carol years ago and stayed anyway.
A Novel Republished as Carol in 1990
Highsmith published The Price of Salt in 1952 under a pseudonym. The book was republished as Carol in 1990.
Carol premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17, 2015. It opened in the United States on November 20 and in the United Kingdom on November 27. It grossed over $42 million against an $11 million budget.
What Carol Gets Right
Carol earns its reputation. The restraint is the point, not a limitation. Haynes trusts the audience to read a glance, a glove, a hand on a shoulder, and the film is better for refusing to explain itself.
The weakest stretch is the road trip, where the pacing sags and the film leans on mood. The strongest is everything around Harge, where the legal threat against Carol turns a love story into a story about who is allowed to keep their child.
The tagline promises that some people change your life forever. Carol is more specific than that. It shows what it costs to let them.
- Title: Carol (2015)
- Director: Todd Haynes
- Screenwriter: Phyllis Nagy
- Based on: The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (1952; republished as Carol in 1990)
- Runtime: 118 minutes
- Genres: Romance, Drama
- Principal cast: Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Kyle Chandler, Jake Lacy, Sarah Paulson
- Premiere: Cannes Film Festival, May 17, 2015
- US release: November 20, 2015
- UK release: November 27, 2015
- Budget: $11 million
- Gross: over $42 million
- Metacritic: 94/100
- Score: 9.4/10
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