Todd Haynes (USA, born 1961)

Carol (2015)

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

In Todd Haynes’s period piece Carol, the titular character, played by Cate Blanchett, is having lunch with a younger woman, Therese, played by Rooney Mara, and suddenly remarks ‘What a strange girl you are.’

‘Why?’ asks Therese.

‘Flung out of space,’ replies Carol, in a faraway, dreamy tone.

Therese’s reaction could justifiably have been confounded, even annoyed, but instead she smiles politely, shyly, looks down at the table, and the scene, for the viewer at least, ends.

It seemed oddly coincidental considering the film that I had just finished reviewing, one where Scarlett Johansson had, quite literally, been flung out of space. There’s nothing particularly otherworldly about Therese, but the statement is apparently significant enough that Carol feels compelled to repeat it later, during the film’s big love scene.

We’re aware from an early stage that these two women are going to become involved romantically. It’s evident from the way they speak to each other, even though neither of them say anything remotely suggestive, Carol’s odd remark being perhaps the sole slight exception. The only questions, then, are what the surrounding circumstances are going to be regarding their tryst (this is 1952, so we know that there are going to be problems), and then, of course, how the story will ultimately all turn out in the end.

Carol is a stately film which oozes class. All the period details are on-point, it’s extremely well-photographed, and the performances are all of a high standard. It was also, to these eyes, a little dull. This is a film that moves at its own unhurried pace, and that’s fine, but I thought maybe the dialogue was just a little too dry, the tone just a little too understated at times.

There are echoes of Ida in the way the two women, one around 20 years older than the other, get into a vintage car and embark on a road trip through the landscape of a thoroughly bygone era. Rooney Mara was 30 when she shot this film, but looks decidedly younger, and I would posit her character Therese to be around 24. It’s young, to be sure, but it’s comfortably older than the five young women I’ve been recently discussing- Ida, Mia (Fish Tank), Adele (Blue is the Warmest Color), Lisa (Margaret) or Penny Lane (Almost Famous). She certainly has the nous to enter into a relationship with Carol- we are in no question that our character is a woman, not an adolescent, and despite her repeatedly-stated uncertainty regarding her life’s direction, she is in a position to make considered decisions, and capable. Therese carries with her a quiet but unmistakable maturity, though at one point Carol remarks that she’s ‘blossomed’, possibly in reference to the latent notion that the younger woman is not quite fully-formed yet, that she still has a certain amount of growing to do before she is the finished article.

I feel somehow that Carol is a film that is neither good nor bad. If you go into it determined to like it, then you definitely will; it’s incredibly well-made, and it pulses with restrained, dignified beauty. But if you’re looking to find fault, then you also will- it’s enamoured by its own worthiness, and its ability to construct entire scenes, entire relationships, from decidedly small seeds.

I myself began the film neutral and I ended it neutral- nothing lost, nothing particularly gained. I don’t feel the film was a waste of time, and I don’t wish to imply that it was- if you like this kind of period drama, then it comes unconditionally recommended. But I felt it was more akin to a museum piece, or an artefact, than an actual, full-bloodied movie that had insight, substance and depth. I didn’t dislike it; I might even watch it again at some point. But as the credits rolled, I shrugged and wondered how I was going to turn my indifference into an adequate, coherent review.

Far From Heaven (2002) 

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

Of course, I do my best not to pre-judge films before I’ve even started them, but I had a certain expectation about Far From Heaven before I put it on. It was another Todd Haynes film set in the 1950s. It was going to cover the same thematic ground as Carol. It was going to be a stylistic exercise with a certain tone that bordered on self-satisfaction and frustratingly little going on beneath the surface. It was going to leave me without much to say.

I was wrong. I really liked this movie. I felt able to engage with it much more closely than I had with Carol- or, for that matter, its spiritual sibling Brooklyn. This is not to say, necessarily, that Todd Haynes is a better screenwriter than Phyllis Nagy (though based solely on the limited evidence of these two films, I would opine that he is), but rather that he may be at his most effective when he is adapting his own work. Perhaps he even took pains to make his contribution to Carol somewhat unintrusive, letting the material of Highsmith and Nagy ‘breathe’ as much as possible with relatively minimal directorial input, and if so, that may be a factor in why I found the resulting film a little empty and lacking certain ingredients that may have made it feel like a more substantial piece.

Are those ingredients the ones that are presented right here in Far From Heaven- racial tensions, the collapsing of an idyllic, exemplary nuclear family, and the dramatic frissons that occur when one’s homosexuality is a painful internal struggle rather than the relatively matter-of-fact, blithe way that Carol’s central couple felt towards their impulses? Well, not specifically- of course not- but they certainly serve as examples of elements that might have made my experience of Carol altogether more affecting. It is, thus, very easy for me to call Far From Heaven a more satisfying film, with more to grab onto. While its vision of the 1950s and the attitudes thereof do, somewhat unavoidably, call to mind Haynes’s 2015 period piece, it has a different sort of beating heart, one that aches with melancholy, longing and lost opportunity, and subsequently does not feel as buttoned-up or restrained. This possibly sounds as if I resent the happy ending that occurred in Carol, and I don’t- not at all. But the characters played by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in that film knew who they were, and though they were irritated at being forced to live in a clandestine manner and conduct their relationship under a veil of artifice, such circumstances did not appear to result in any significant introspection or existential tumult, hence I felt there was a certain amount of dramatic tension that was notable by its absence.

By contrast, Julianne Moore plays a woman who, despite being fortysomething, still seems to be searching for her identity. She has a very pronounced social persona, and plays the role gamely, but something itches at her- as events develop, we can deduce that she’s probably wondering if she married the right person. Her husband, Dennis Quaid, has similarly forced himself into a life that doesn’t fit him. We can imagine that, as a younger man, he didn’t feel he had much choice but to go along with the prevailing social code of the day- to marry respectably, to take a position as the head of a family unit- and he convinced himself back then that things would somehow all turn out okay in the end. The terrific Dennis Haysbert plays Raymond, a man who could quite feasibly be a version of his President Palmer from the TV show 24 if he had been born forty years earlier, under massively different circumstances- temperate, kind, thoughtful, empirically dignified, assertive when necessary. A good father who is aggrieved by the racial subjugation he receives, but also calmly tries to get on with his life without letting it interfere too much.

In line with Raymond’s peaceful attitude, I felt that this was in itself a calm film, even when it depicted arguments, and even when it explored systemic injustice and malicious tittle-tattle. It was a film which rather simply asked a few gentle and probing questions without feeling the need to get too heavy-handed or lay anything on too thick, despite flirting with the machinations of a melodrama. In some ways, this was merely a portrait of three people who were born too early- if these events had occurred 30 years later, then these three could feasibly have had the lives that they wanted and it would have been far less trouble. Of course, racism hadn’t been ‘solved’ by the 1980s, and neither had homophobia, but hopefully the crux of my point stands nonetheless. In addition, the movie also felt more ‘colourful’ than Carol or Brooklyn, as Haynes employed a sharp palette of rich iridescence, especially regarding red, which made the period feel vital and alive even as its deep social flaws were laid out- one felt a lamenting touch of regret emanating from Far From Heaven, intermingling with its thornier themes, that those days are forever over and that we don’t live with those kinds of aesthetics anymore.

A bittersweet, touching triumph.

Safe (1995)

Safe stars Julianne Moore as Carol, a woman in her mid-thirties who has married an older man and is stepmother to his adolescent son. The three of them live a very comfortable and intrinsically materialistic life. This world is shattered when Carol comes down with a mysterious illness that can’t be treated by any traditional means and won’t go away.

Safe appears to share Michael Haneke’s contempt for the pampered, vapid, private golf-club, gated-community, cocktail-hour middle classes, but it refrains from the cruelty and viciousness that Haneke is apt to employ; instead, it establishes the contempt at a low level and then just lets it sit. Other than a new couch, for example, Carol is not shown making any large purchases and does not exhibit any obvious, overtly spoiled diva behaviour (this would be a very different movie, built on completely different principles, if our central character was thoroughly unlikeable). Similarly, it’s merely suggested that the husband might be a selfish and tempestuous jerk without making such an assessment concrete, juxtaposing this perturbing possibility with other scenes where it seems he may genuinely care about his wife and want the best for her.

The effect is that Carol’s disquieting experiences are being somewhat replicated for the viewer, whose head is also filled with fog and doubt. As she moves into a facility about halfway through the movie, bisecting the film quite cleanly down the middle, there’s just something off about the place, about the way people speak to each other there, and in particular there’s something off about its figurehead, played skilfully by Peter Friedman, who exhibits oiliness without the film ever actually telling us beyond doubt that he is a villain. There’s just something off about his overly pleasant and empathetic manner. There’s something off about the exercises he has the patients take part in, which are cloying and invasive without being outright insidious or cultish. And then, eventually, as the film draws to a close, there’s something off about Carol herself, aside from her illness, as this viewer realised belatedly that they may have just spent the movie’s runtime with an actual, honest-to-god, blithering idiot.

Centred around a woman who has a strange and impossible problem, with palpable and decidedly portentous undercurrents of sociocultural comment, Safe perhaps operates in a similar spirit as Birth, White Material and The Headless Woman. Admirably, it predates all of them, and may justifiably be considered a pioneer for this type of obtuse, female-centric cinematic storytelling. As an intellectual exercise, I found Safe to be eminently successful, with moral complexity, character-based nuance and enigmatic implication all commingling in a rich, satisfying bouquet of dramatic flavours. That Carol might in fact be an idiot adds a further note of pronounced bitterness not found in the three other movies mentioned, complicating the probing questions asked of the viewer as to where their sympathies lie, or where indeed they should lie. Idiot or not, surely Carol does not deserve to be manipulated and lied to, nor does she deserve the terrible health that she has found herself in- few people do. It also worryingly suggests that her husband, behind his surly but quasi-reasonable demeanour, has deliberately married someone that he knows he can control, subjugate and undermine.

I didn’t like the film as much as Far from Heaven, but that barely seems to matter- the later film was warmer, much less sterile, and marinated in a beautiful 1950s aesthetic backdrop. Safe is clearly aiming for very different effects, despite some overlap as regards the place of women in society and in the home. All good.