Todd Haynes (2015)

Todd Haynes can’t have personal recollections of the 1950s – he was born in 1961 – but he’s clearly drawn to the period.  His feelings about the decade are no less evidently divided:  Haynes deplores the social prejudices and benighted views of sexuality that prevailed but he’s in love with the American cinema and the accoutrements of the period.  Carol takes place, mainly in New York City and its environs, in the winter of 1952-53, a few years earlier than Haynes’s previous fifties foray-paean Far from Heaven.  The latter had what was technically an original screenplay by Haynes although the writer-director was at pains to highlight his debt to Douglas Sirk’s 1955 film, All That Heaven Allows.  The screenplay for Carol is definitely an adaptation – by Phyllis Nagy, from The Price of Salt, a semi-autobiographical novel which Patricia Highsmith completed in 1951 and which was published the following year, under the pseudonym Claire Morgan.  Carol is the story of a lesbian relationship between the title character, Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), a glamorous, fortyish New Jersey wife and mother, on the verge of divorce from her angrily possessive husband; and Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), who wants to be a photographer but who has a temporary Christmas job as a shopgirl in a Manhattan store called Frankenberg’s, when she and Carol first clap eyes on each other in the store’s toy department,

Aided by his usual, brilliant cinematographer and production designer – Edward Lachman and Judy Becker respectively – Todd Haynes revels in the visual possibilities of the time and place:  Christmas displays and decorations, Carol’s fur coat, falling snow.  Some of the beautiful visual effects are imaginative.  I liked a sequence in which Therese – at what appears to be the end of the affair – rides in a taxi on a cold, rainy evening and starts to think about Carol.  Therese can make out people in the street through the steamed-up window of the cab but Haynes makes clear that she sees and doesn’t see them – her mind’s eye is on someone else.  It would be wrong to see this film (as some reviewers have seen it) as repeating the Technicolor lushness of Far from Heaven.   Carol has a visual texture different from its predecessor’s; the new film was shot on Super 16.  As Haynes explained in an interview with Ryan Gilbey in this month’s Sight and Sound, ‘The speed of film stocks and the speed of lenses today are so sophisticated, the grain content has basically vanished. … [Edward Lachman] and I were like, “Oh, let’s degrade and let’s force that grain back into it.”‘  This doesn’t mean, however, that Carol is less stylised than Far from Heaven.  As in the earlier film, the stylisation has such a starring role that it verges on smothering the drama.  Even if you don’t get Todd Haynes’s specific references to other movies, you can’t fail to be aware that his film-making is steeped in cinema history, and this tends to infect your reception of his work:  for example, Carter Burwell’s music for Carol is supple and effective but it often comes across as a pastiche of the Philip Glass score for The Hours.  It’s jarring too when something anomalous (rarely) occurs.  The fluency of Phyllis Nagy’s dialogue here is interrupted only once, when Carol says to her ex-lover Abby (Sarah Paulson), ‘Don’t be daft’.   This may be a direct quote from the novel but you stub your ears on ‘daft’ – it sticks out as an Anglicism.

As I watched the film, I couldn’t understand why it took so long for Carol and Therese to sleep together.  They – Carol, especially – didn’t seem to be holding back in other respects.  My immediate thought was that the love-making had been artificially delayed by Todd Haynes to place the bed scene at just the point he wanted it, and to give it a salience there wouldn’t have been with repeated sexual episodes.  Then I saw Margaret Talbot’s piece on The Price of Salt in the New Yorker[1], which suggested that both the deferral and the realisation of sex in the film were faithful to the Highsmith novel, in which:

‘The two women embark on a road trip, and the descriptions of it read like a noirish dream—stiff drinks, wood-panelled motel rooms, a gun in a suitcase. A detective hired by Carol’s husband pursues the couple, and you can feel Highsmith’s thriller muscles twitching to life.  … The love story is at once hijacked and heightened by the chase story. … When the women at last make love, Highsmith describes it with a sacramental intensity …’

Todd Haynes, with his fetish for beautification, plays down this narrative strand: he doesn’t have ‘thriller muscles’.  The private detective hired by Carol’s husband Harge does appear in the film (and is well played by Cory Michael Smith) but there’s little sense of his pursuing Carol and Therese – and no sense of the ‘chase story’ delaying the consummation of Carol’s and Therese’s feelings for each other..  The women meet the detective at the motel where they’re staying and he’s another guest; he passes himself off as a travelling salesman and is only later unmasked by Carol.  By de-emphasising the chase, Todd Haynes dissipates the rationale for postponing the sex.  Elsewhere in the same issue of the New Yorker in which Margaret Talbot’s article appeared (30 November 2015), Anthony Lane commends the film of Carol, with some reservations.  He thinks insufficient attention is paid to Carol’s relationship with her daughter, to the social gap between Carol and Therese, and to Therese’s ambitions to be a photographer.  This isn’t fair criticism in terms of the screen time given to any of these elements yet I can see why Lane felt this way:  their subjugation to the aesthetic scheme of the movie means that none of them has much impact.

The age difference between Carol and Therese doesn’t count for much either.  According to Margaret Talbot, Therese is nineteen and Carol ‘in her thirties’ in The Price of Salt.  Patricia Highsmith herself was twenty-seven when the incident that planted the seed of the novel in her mind occurred (Highsmith was working as a store assistant at Bloomingdale’s at the time).  Rooney Mara, twenty-nine when Carol was in production, is convincing as someone in her very early twenties or even younger – she certainly seems young enough to be the daughter of forty-five-year-old Cate Blanchett.  The ‘road trip’ in Carol has been compared with the one in Lolita, as Humbert Humbert drives urgently, with the major-minor object of his desire, from one place to the next.  Anthony Lane mentions this; a piece on the back page of the Times Literary Supplement last month described, even though it also pooh-poohed, a school of thought that this element of Nabokov’s novel was inspired by Highsmith’s.  Even if the generation gap between Carol and Therese isn’t necessarily crucial, it seems odd that Carol’s husband (Kyle Chandler), given how censorious he is about his wife’s friendship with her near-contemporary Abby, doesn’t more aggressively see Therese as beyond the pale, for reasons of youth as well as gender.

Cate Blanchett’s portrait of Carol is an immaculate expression of Todd Haynes’s approach.  Each line reading, gesture, look and movement is technically accomplished – you repeatedly register the actress’s achievement of perfection, just as you register the succession of faultlessly composed images in the film.  Haynes seems to have wanted Blanchett to evoke old-style Hollywood portrayals of lesbians and she obliges.  In her Village Voice review, Stephanie Zacharek wittily describes Blanchett’s presence as ‘like a waft of perfume with a woman attached’.  What she and Haynes do in Carol also reminded me of fine dining menus that offer ‘textures’ (of mushrooms or cauliflower or whatever):  Cate Blanchett serves up textures of screen lesbian.  Many people watching Carol will likely find this entirely satisfying – film students for whom it’s more than enough for a movie to be relatable to other movies, those who (like me) get plenty of interest and pleasure from watching an outstanding actor demonstrate their skills.  Blanchett’s playing comes, though, at the cost of dramatic sense.  It’s fundamental to the story that Haynes tells that Carol has much greater sexual experience than Therese; and the nature of her former relationship with Abby is presented as a main reason for the disintegration of Carol’s marriage, even though Abby’s openness about her sexuality is contrasted with Carol’s troubled uncertainty.  Cate Blanchett goes further, however, and to confusing effect.  She suggests – from the moment that Carol appears in the department store and sees Therese behind the counter – a practised seducer sizing up her next prey.  Blanchett does create remarkable contrasts between the superbly assured shopper and the tense, regretful Carol at home, with the suspicious husband and the young daughter (Sadie and Kk Heim) she’s about to lose.  But her smouldering lesbian quintessence is so dominant that it’s hard to believe that Carol can wait as long as she does to bed Therese.

Therese, who seems to have no female friends, is rather detached from her unexciting boyfriend Richard (Jake Lacy) from an early stage, although he doesn’t appear to notice.  Even if Todd Haynes is thereby be making a point about how young men of Richard’s generation automatically saw young women, it still means that Therese’s developing relationship with Carol doesn’t involve the dismantling of a substantial one with Richard.  Rooney Mara’s fine portrait of Therese mines an interesting element of the material, though.  Carol’s and Therese’s first look at each other in Frankenberg’s has a coup de foudre quality but this doesn’t mean that Therese naturally infers that she finds Carol physically attractive.  In the early stages of the relationship, Mara implies rather that Therese finds herself increasingly drawn to Carol and would think herself in love if Carol were not a woman.  In the world that Therese inhabits, women don’t fall in love with each other sexually.  She can therefore hardly make sense of her feelings.  (Although the setting is very different, the collision of sexual imperative and social impossibility recalls Ennis Del Mar’s predicament in Brokeback Mountain.)  And because Rooney Mara’s Therese isn’t – compared with Cate Blanchett’s Carol – a flawlessly finished piece of work, her character retains a greater human interest.  Among the men in the story, none is presented more unsympathetically than Harge but Kyle Chandler, so good in The Wolf of Wall Street, is excellent again in this unenviable role.

If you were to criticise the dramatis personae in a Haynes film for not being likeable or engaging you’d be missing the point.  Their qualities as people are subsidiary to the part they have to play as figures in a finely-woven tapestry.  This isn’t to say that Haynes’s characters are lifeless but he turns them – to my mind, reduces them – to design components.  The very end of Carol is highly effective precisely because it seems a departure from this.  The concluding across-a-crowded-room eye contact between Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara is affecting.  As a result, it’s invigorating too; besides, we weren’t expecting things to turn out as well for the two women as it appears they do.  The impact of this finale may even deceive the viewer into thinking that the drama that preceded it had similar heft.  Todd Haynes takes you by surprise in this moment yet it’s fitting that a stylist like him should end things with a kind of emotional trompe l’oeil.

3 December 2015

[1]  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/30/forbidden-love