Thanks, I Hate It: Carol

Todd Haynes will always have a place in my heart for Velvet Goldmine, his languidly erotic and bratty headfirst dive into the world of glam rock. The cockeyed insight and desperate outsider sliminess of that film is nowhere in 2015's critically beloved Carol, an adaptation of novelist Patricia Highsmith's The High Price of Salt. Instead Haynes paints a staid, formalist portrait of two women -- one rich, bored, and blithe, the other mousy and poor -- in love. It's also humorless, distant, and sexually antiseptic. 

Rooney Mara fairly disappears into the woodwork next to Cate Blanchett in the title role. That's clearly intentional, but it doesn't make for interesting viewing. She plays Therese like a woman who goes home at night to an empty apartment and zips herself into a big leather suitcase. With that kind of restraint there's no real opportunity to dig into the attraction between these very different women, and certainly none of the studied polish and trembling abandon Highsmith uses to conceal her characters' deep, self-negating anxiety. These people have no physicality. They have no chemistry.

The sex is truly dismal paint by numbers stuff, one woman kissing her way down the other's body toward the inevitable implied cunnilingus with all the enthusiasm of a tired bricklayer applying mortar. There's no passion, and nothing darker or more self-involved to justify its absence. Instead it's perfectly smooth bodies lying rigidly in close proximity, their motions mechanical, their connection inscrutable and boring. There is no nastiness to it, no sense of vulnerability. Why make sex a part of your film at all if you're only going to show it at its most rote and unremarkable?

Many of the spaces through which Therese and Carol move are beautiful to look at. Few of them feel real, or lived in. The distance Haynes builds around the women's lives is too effective at shutting out any possibility of insight into their emotions or connection to their experiences as closeted and marginalized people. The film is empathetic toward them, but it lacks sympathy, the visceral tug that can send viewers sliding into skins foreign to their own. It's an empty frivolity, too self-serious in its burnt umber, eggshell, and gold leaf color palette, its dusty sunlight and expressionless faces, to say anything about anyone at all.