Movie Review: ‘Carol’ is about breaking a taboo

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By Joe Morgenstern

Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in a scene from ‘Carol’ Photo: Weinstein Co.

HOLLYWOOD---There’s a moment in “Carol” when unspoken feelings are finally spoken, and passionately. The setting is a motel in Iowa—in Waterloo, of all fatefully named towns—during the early 1950s. Two lovers who have stopped there for the night, Cate Blanchett’s regal Carol and Rooney Mara’s younger, unworldly Therese, are together in bed. This exquisitely crafted film, directed by Todd Haynes and adapted by Phyllis Nagy from a novel by Patricia Highsmith, is often about what can’t be said in an era of emotional mutedness. That’s not a recipe for dramatic vitality, which is in short supply. But loneliness and longing are at the center of these two women’s lives, at least for a while, and they’re expressed by nuance and implication in a pair of superb performances, and by a lovely evocation of the period. [link]