Stella Adler once said something like (I've tried and failed to find the exact quote): “many actors act well, but few act as they should”. A piece of MacMahonian doctrine right there, applicable to many other things, including directing.
Carol is the 6th feature film directed by Todd Haynes, poster boy of the so-called New Queer Cinema, branding which for better and worse Haynes has done what he can to validate, at least since his 1998 glam/gay crypto-Bowie-biopic Velvet Goldmine.
Based on a eponymous (and alternatively titled The Price of Salt) Patricia Highsmith novel I now want to read, Carol tells the story of Carol Aird (Cate Blanchet), elegant upper middle class housewife and mother with a bit of a lesbian past, who falls for and proceeds to patiently and persistently seduce younger department store clerk and conspicuously Audrey Hepburn lookalike Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), with standard melodramatic consequences, including Therese ending up embracing a beatnik-ish lifestyle (this is 50s NYC) and mandatory open-ended ending.
The film surprisingly downplays the difficulties of coming out as a lesbian in those days, when that implied either to consort and share fate with Lumpen, a la Bessie Smith, or to be born behind the walls of privilege and pay and have others pay the price, a la Eleanor Roosevelt. A court does grant custody of Carol's little daughter to her very reluctantly estranged husband (Kyle Chandler) but other than that, the quarrels of the characters are unexceptional except for the homoerotic context. Carol has superlative production design, period detail, wardrobe, cinematography (by regular Edward Lachman), lighting and soundtrack (distinctly reminiscent of Philip Glass, by Coen Bros regular Carter Burwell) and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those responsible end up winning a few of next year's coveted Real McCoys. Todd Haynes, it must be admitted, is up to the measure of his crew, having painstakingly honed his talents to make Carol look like a feminine William Wyler-like pendant to his masculine Douglas Sirk-like Far From Heaven (2002). None of which salvages Carol from ultimately being a film à thèse, as if someone in the marketing vaults of the film industry decided the lesbian community, if there is such a thing, needed a Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) to call their own, and ordered design and finance accordingly. Not quite up to the production and direction values, the cast is equally praiseworthy, except for the unremarkable histrionics of Ms Blanchet, who reportedly was bewildered for not having won the respective Oscar.
Joe Mantegna, playing a misanthropical Dean Martin in Rob Cohen's 1998 Rat Pack, upon hearing someone complain “he called me a motherfucker!”, cynically quipped “I'm sure he meant it in the best possible way…” Something similar can be said of Carol: one of the nicest boxes of chocolates ever filmed, but not much more than a nice box of chocolates.