Todd Haynes’ latest movie, Carol, is an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt. It is a wonderfully stylish piece, as you would expect from Haynes, beautifully styled with every detail exquisitely observed. Cate Blanchett plays Carol, a glamorous socialite who falls in love with a department-store assistant Therese (Rooney Mara), a wide-eyed, reserved young girl who ‘always says yes’. This inciting incident should trigger a story of deep emotional complexity, but I was left feeling emotionally indifferent.
Depicting gender issues in their historical context is fraught with dangers of anachronism and cliché, but these can be avoided if we’re drawn into a real sense of what it was like at the time, what was at stake. However, Carol left me with no sense of the social jeopardy homosexual women must have faced. Instead, we are treated to stereotypical scenes, such as the first encounter between the women where Carol buys a toy train for her daughter on the recommendation of Terese who says she never played with dolls as a girl – a clumsy signpost of her sexuality.
When we do get a scene that could really reveal truthful insights, it’s never fully developed. Carol’s husband Harge (Kyle Chandler), for instance, is threatening to take their infant daughter away from her in a custody battle. In one scene with their lawyers, Blanchett delivers a brilliant performance as she talks about the future of the child. This is a huge, powerfully emotional moment but it’s cut short and the narrative moves quickly back to the predictable love story. The film misses numerous opportunities where the drama could be taken further.
This is a beautiful film that wears its beauty skin-deep. As a film about a gay couple in the 1950s, it should say something important and insightful. But in the end, it is an ambitious movie constrained by being an adaptation of an autobiographical novel.