Todd Haynes' CAROL, adapting Patricia Highsmith's pseudonymous early '50s lesbian romance

She may be good in a peloton ad.

Even more luxuriousness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WkFSpgezec

It doesn't come with poached eggs, creamed spinach, and a shaker of martinis

My wife and I watched this last night on DVD. We noted the irony of it being released by The Weinstein Company with Harvey credited as an Executive Producer.

When it was over we both agreed that the story had tremendous potential power, but at every turn the director chose the easiest, most reductive and superficial path to tell the story of his characters. The acting was meant to be subtle, but often strayed over the boundary into stasis. The costumes shouted 1950s glamour as loudly as possible, but costumes and hairstyles are, at best, enhancements to telling a story, not a substitute for one. Even the music was a bland rehash of every movie music cliché. Tbf, the cinematography was mostly decent.

If the point of all this was to convey a sense of the suffocation of his characters' lives then Haynes misunderstood his means for his end and wound up suffocating their story instead.

Didn't have that reaction at all. Maybe seeing it in a theater made the difference for me. I thought that the story was beautifully told and that the acting was great. The grainy 16 mm print on a big screen felt electric to me. And I thought Carter Burwell's score was restrained and perfect.

To me Carol is easily one of the best films of the last 10 years

ok, i see I made my crit clear about the Mara sisters already. just no. They deaden all films.

I agree with Aimless here, while I legit consider Haynes a hero this film was so nothing, to me. I often think of a comment that an ILXor, maybe it was Vegemite girl, maybe not, made re: Mad Men that it was so laconic it was like they didn't even realise they were making a TV show that people would invest in - wildly paraphrasing there but the comment stuck with me and I often think about it w/r/t this film which obv. works on details but is underpowered to the point that it drives me mad with it's pointlessness.

but this, basically

If the point of all this was to convey a sense of the suffocation of his characters' lives then Haynes misunderstood his means for his end and wound up suffocating their story instead.

i want to think this could be an entirely different, better film with another lead. or a choice not to let them be an uncharismatic, blank slate, any woman.

there's a kind of surface ≥ feeling which I can get behind generally but not here. There's a scene in which Carol is putting on nail varnish wich Haynes obviously is very invested in.

i want to think this could be an entirely different, better film with another lead. or a choice not to let them be an uncharismatic, blank slate, any woman.

see i like mara in the role for just that reason - the character is an unformed person. A performer who was doing a lot of interesting & charismatic Acting would have undermined the whole premise imo

I thought Mara’s Therese was kind of a cipher at first and I was interested that he interpreted the characters from the novel in the way he did, with such an extreme imbalance between them in both personality and power.

I know relationships like that though, with power and benevolence shifting as the relationship progresses. I thought it was really moving

and I thought Rooney Mara was great in the end

well, it was the poolboy but instead the shopgirl. And the shopgirl was not interesting either.

lol

yeah i didn't find any part of this film that needed to be predicated on that character being interesting. probably the opposite. i had never really had a good haynes experience but i liked this a lot when i saw it.

I'm still ambivalent (link above) but the performers are fine.

And y'all need to try creamed spinach and poached eggs with an ice-cold martini.

ohhh i see there is a velvet goldmine doc.

"What a strange girl you are. Flung out of space"

Are we to think that lesbians are strange and flung out of space?

i didn't find any part of this film that needed to be predicated on that character being interesting

That is a highly peculiar view. Given this, where did the interest in this film lie for you? In the filmic technicalities or in some element that illuminated the lives of the entirely uninteresting characters? Because, if it is the latter, then it seems to me you found something of interest about the characters. If it is the former, then fine, but a deep appreciation of filmic technicalities is not the sort of audience response that most directors or audiences would consider as indicating a successful film.

Individuals don’t have to be interesting for their stories to be interesting. Hardly anyone is interesting.

So what was interesting for you?

"Are we to think that lesbians are strange and flung out of space?"

What?? It was a memorable line of dialogue from the film

"In the filmic technicalities or in some element that illuminated the lives of the entirely uninteresting characters?"

they weren't uninteresting to me

not going to argue anymore about this

Observing characters that seem like real humans living their human lives can be interesting, even if those characters themselves as individuals are not “interesting people”, like if you met them at a party or whatever. It’s one of the main reasons to watch movies imo. Ymmv I guess but that character and Mara’s performance felt truthful to me, which can be enough for a movie. Maybe it would be more interesting if she were a secret agent or something but idk.

reaallllly don't want to talk much more film here but i will say that as far as the movie is concerned it matters much more that carol sees something in her than that we see something in her.