"CAROL": A MOVIE REVIEW...AND MORE

I was watching an interview the other day with film director Todd Haynes. I had never heard of him. He was talking about a movie he made that was recently released. “Carol” stars Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. It is adapted from a book written in 1952 by Patricia Highsmith.

The interview was very compelling. Haynes sensitivities made me want to see what he was talking about. He was very eloquent at making this film seem like a very human story, slow, character driven, set in the 1950’s, about two women, one older and married, one younger and not, who meet in a department store and instantly fall in love. Set in the 50’s it was more than a very forbidden topic for the time. As a book, called “The Price of Salt” it was rejected by her publisher at the time, even though Highsmith’s previous book had been bought by Alfred Hitchcock and turned into a very successful film “Stranger on a Train”. Highsmith also wrote “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and 20 other novels, all of them in the mystery/crime genre…..except for “The Price of Salt”, which was clearly much more personal. Eventually a lesbian publishing house (Naiad Press) released the book. One can only imagine how out of touch with the times and scandalous would be a novel about an older, chain smoking woman, wedded, sophisticated, wearing fur, gloves and matching pill box hat... who has a love affair with a naïve ingénue, barely out of bangs, who works at a toy store and is aimlessly trying to understand life from her small window on it..

I was in New York this weekend and I happened to see it playing in a small old theater adjacent to the Plaza Hotel on 59th street. The theater had been in that spot, ironically, since 1949, and it was protected by the historical society in New York. The seats were that velvet-like material that was so common in the theatres of my youth. These seats were a light greenish/blue and I could almost imagine that they were the original material given the aging and faded color. The theater had no ornamentation unlike so many older, more decorated, theaters that we can imagine. It was plain, with a mezzanine, but it was authentic, and it added to the nostalgia of the time period in the film.

This film is from one of my favorite genres, or so I call it a genre. Slow paced, character driven films that often speak without the spoken word; films that are about relationships, usually between just a few people, very little action and often not with a lot of dialogue. By the time the film is over your pulse rate is barely detectable, it’s almost a meditation.

“Carol” is very stylish…the costumes and sets and scenes take you right back to the Eisenhower years, Studebakers, and men and women wearing hats. But, for me, the beautiful physicality of the movie wasn’t matched by the story itself. Yes, it was very forbidden and provocative to see these two women, in this time, strike a love affair and share one another’s bodies, but I needed more to care about. The older women (Carol) is played by Cate Blanchett. She is in her forties, in a marriage where she is no longer interested in her husband, if she ever was. Just in the last few years of her marriage she had had a lesbian affair with one of her childhood friends that her husband, apparently, discovered. It didn’t dampen his love for her. He still loves her and wants her. They have a 4 year old daughter together who Carol seems attached to…at least until she meets a much younger toy store clerk while out shopping named, Therese (pronounced: Ta Rez), played by Rooney Mara. Carol decides not to go on the Christmas trip to Florida to see family with her husband and daughter. She kisses her daughter goodbye and turns her back on the pleas of her husband to accompany them. She wants space from her husband, and ultimately to be with her new unsuspecting companion.

I say “unsuspecting” because Therese is always unsuspecting. She has a boyfriend who wants to marry her but she just doesn’t feel right about it. She has not had sex with him yet, perhaps due to an unconfirmed clarity about her own sexuality. She doesn’t even suspect where her relationship with Carol is headed...though she is very willing to find out.

When with Carol she feels cared for…and listened to…though their conversation is, if not hackneyed, certainly less substantive and cathartic than I had hoped. The main conflict in the story is between Carol and her husband. He becomes aware of the fresh affair she is having and hires a lawyer to call for an injunction prohibiting her from seeing her daughter based on a “morals clause” that existed in the statutes at the time. Men had much control in custody battles in that era. More realistically he is countering retribution for her not being in love with him anymore...and for insulting his manhood even further by courting intimacy with a woman. Carol confronts this reality and assault on her motherhood, puts up a brief fight…but only for a short moment, and then she is back to being a mistress and her young daughter no longer appears to be even in her peripheral vision. This, for me, was the most salient theme in the movie, though I doubt Haynes intended it to be more than a detail. I became disinterested in Carol’s romantic life, totally unsympathetic, when I saw how her crucial role as mother to a young child took a back seat to selfish pursuits, purely selfish. I even become disinterested in Therese knowing, as she did, that Carol was not preoccupied with her own child as any mother, even if only by duty, is expected to be….. the whole darn love affair took on a self centered grossness to me at that point. It didn’t matter any more. If they were off curing cancer together I could grant Carol a little more slack…though only a little.

It reminded me of something that I have long acknowledged, at least since I became a father….that I could never fall in love with a women who could separate from her own children just to be with me. It’s just a rule I have.

Back to author Patricia Highsmith:

Highsmith was born in 1921 in New York and her parents divorced just before she was born. She was sent to live with her grandmother for a year when she was 12 which she said was “the saddest year of her life”. She felt abandonment and disregard from her mother and this never stopped haunting her. According to Highsmith, her mother once told her that she had tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. Highsmith was a lesbian herself and never had children. She was an alcoholic and was generally considered by those who knew her to be a miserable person, often cruel, ….and described by one acquaintance to be “unloving” and “unlovable”. She preferred animals over people and once said, “My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people.”.

So, for me, there is irony in a story about a lesbian affair... that comes at the expense of a small child, written by a lesbian who never assuaged her own feelings of abandonment, masking it instead with alcohol and many short term relationships, and animals.

Who could fault Highsmith for writing a story where the welfare of a 4 year old girl (and the sacred relationship she has with her mother) is dismissed in favor of the hedonistic pursuits of adults. Part of being an adult, and certainly essential to being a parent, is to know that children, most especially your own children, cannot navigate life on their own; their perspective on life is dependent to a very large degree on the amount of nurturing and love they receive when they are at their most dependent and vulnerable. Patricia Highsmith was telling the only story she knew….she never corrected for her own childhood, and never made peace with it….

And in so doing..she no doubt lost many of the mothers in the audience. It was a fundamental violation of the heart….

It was a stark crack in the mirror…and no amount of style and beautiful period recreation could mend it….

Food for Thought......