Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett in Carol
Jesse Pasternack describes why Todd Haynes’s 2015 classic is a paragon of the filmmaker’s work with period pieces.
When I first saw Carol, I thought it would be a perfect film to watch on TCM in a few decades. Everything about that film’s technical style felt like it harkened back to an older age of cinema. But at the same time, it felt like it was contributing something relatively new to mainstream American cinema by telling a story of a love affair between two women, which never would have been possible during the era which the film so lavishly recreates. That combination of luxurious aesthetics and a somewhat radical narrative is a hallmark of this film’s director Todd Haynes, who has repeatedly excelled at directing period pieces.
Carol is an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt (1952). It tells the story of Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), who bonds with a wealthy woman named Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett). But their increasingly romantic relationship will have consequences, especially for Carol’s custody battle with her soon-to-be ex-husband Harge (Kyle Chandler).
One of my favorite things about this film is its visual style. The opening shot, which follows a minor character as he walks through a stunning recreation of New York City in the 1950s, makes you feel like you have traveled back in time. The colors are bright and vivid thanks to the impeccable work of legendary cinematographer Edward Lachman (with whom Haynes has collaborated frequently), who used Super 16mm film stock to shoot Carol. Production designer Judy Becker (who worked with Haynes on his multi-decade Bob Dylan fantasia I’m Not There [2007]) brilliantly creates both the sumptuous environments which define Carol’s life as well as the more bohemian world which Therese inhabits. Haynes and his collaborators had previously made the past feel vibrantly beautiful in Far From Heaven (2002) and Mildred Pierce (2011), and their work on Carol is just as resplendent as it was in their earlier work.
Blanchett as Carol
This magnificent visual splendor exists in exquisite tension with its narrative. It was forbidden to depict same-sex relationships in mainstream American media in the 1950s, especially in as positive a light as this film does. Even Highsmith originally published The Price of Salt under the pseudonym Claire Morgan because she didn’t want to be “labeled a lesbian-book writer.” But one of the thematic hallmarks of Haynes’s period pieces is that they depict relationships which wouldn’t have been depicted (or would have been much harder to depict) in the eras in which they take place. He did that most directly in Far From Heaven, which was also set in the 1950s. That film featured a meaningful interracial friendship between a white woman and a Black man that was better for her than her relationship with her husband, who cheated on her with men. Haynes’s interest in relationships which are looked down upon by mainstream society finds its apotheosis in Carol, which presents its central romantic relationship between two women with all the passion and empathy which the great heterosexual romances received in classic American movies.
Carol received nominations for six Academy Awards and is already viewed as a modern classic. Its mixture of a visual style which would have made Douglas Sirk jealous with a story he never could have told during his glory days in the America of the 1950s is a potent one. That helps make it a crowning achievement in the career of one of America’s most fascinating directors as well as a film which people will continue to watch for decades to come.
Original poster for Carol
Carol will be screened at IU Cinema on December 13 at 7pm as part of an unofficial holiday double feature with The Nightmare Before Christmas, which will follow at 10pm.