Carol is an overwhelmingly beautiful film. It looks like a dream, it sounds like whispered want, and it feels like falling in love in all its stomach-turning terror and ecstasy.
In Carol, director Todd Haynes, his filmmaking team and his formidable leads Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara have birthed that rare, precious creation where the substance, the story and the emotions all stand on equal footing to the film's loveliness -- easily making it one of the year's best.
The story, adapted from Patricia Highsmith's 1952 novel The Price of Salt, is both straightforward and deeply complex. It's about two lost souls at very different ages and stations finding each other by chance and altering the course of the other's life.
It's just a glance -- longing at first sight -- across a crowded Christmastime department store when Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), a gawky shop girl in a tattered Santa hat, spots Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), dripping in tasteful furs and corals and regal confidence. Carol sees Therese, too, and they hold each other's gaze for a wistful moment.
But their mutual, immediate attraction isn't that simple. It's New York City in the early 1950s and same-sex relationships are, at the very least, not a widely accepted public affair. There's more at stake than just the possible heartbreak of any passionate relationship in this setting.
To complicate matters further, Therese doesn't yet know herself that well, and Carol is navigating a divorce from her husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler), with whom she shares a child. Carol's desires are known even to her husband but are largely unspoken. Therese is just discovering hers.
It makes the courtship more subtle than most, but this isn't a film about flouting societal norms on some mass scale. It's about these two people and the profound heartbreak of not fitting in the time period that their lives unwittingly occupy.
But it's the love story that's at the center. Carol remarks that it's as though Therese has been "flung out of space." It could apply to both. Alone, they are lost. Together, they're ablaze.
By Lindsey Bahr, The Associated Press
CAROL (A)
Directed by Todd Haynes. R (a scene of sexuality/nudity and brief language). 118 mins. At the Landmark Magnolia, Angelika Plano and AMC NorthPark.
