Carol is a 2015 historical romantic drama film directed by Todd Haynes. The screenplay by Phyllis Nagy is based on the 1952 romance novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (republished as Carol in 1990). The film stars Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson, Jake Lacy, and Kyle Chandler. Set in 1950s New York City, the story is about a forbidden affair between an aspiring female photographer and an older woman going through a difficult divorce.
Carol was in development since 1997, when Nagy wrote the first draft of the screenplay. British company Film4 Productions and its then-chief executive Tessa Ross financed development. The film was in development hell, facing problems with financing, rights, scheduling conflicts, and accessibility. Number 9 Films came on board as a producer in 2011, when Elizabeth Karlsen secured the rights to the novel. The film is co-produced by New York–based Killer Films, which joined the project in 2013 after Haynes's collaborator Christine Vachon approached him to direct. Principal photography on the British-American production began in March 2014, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and lasted 34 days. Cinematographer Edward Lachman shot Carol on Super 16 mm film.
Carol premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17, 2015, and was released in the United States on November 20 and in the United Kingdom on November 27. Grossing over $42 million on an $11 million budget, the film received widespread acclaim for Haynes's direction and the performances of Blanchett and Mara, and was the best-reviewed film of 2015. It competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, where Mara tied with Emmanuelle Bercot for the Best Actress award. The film received many accolades, including nominations for six Academy Awards, nine BAFTA Awards, and five Golden Globe Awards. It also won five Dorian Awards and awards from the New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and National Society of Film Critics. Carol was ranked by the British Film Institute as the best LGBTQ film of all time, and named one of the greatest films of the 21st Century by the BBC.
Plot
During the Christmas season of 1952, aspiring photographer Therese Belivet is working in Frankenberg's department store in Manhattan. She meets a glamorous woman, Carol Aird, who is searching for a doll for her daughter, Rindy. At Therese's recommendation, Carol purchases a model train set instead. When Carol departs, she leaves her gloves on the counter. Therese mails them to her using Frankenberg's sales slip with Carol's name and address.
Therese's boyfriend, Richard, wants her to go to France with him, hoping they will marry, but she is ambivalent about their relationship. A mutual friend, Dannie, invites Therese to his workplace, The New York Times, and offers to introduce her to a photo editor friend. Meanwhile, Carol is going through a difficult divorce from her husband, Harge. Carol calls Frankenberg's to thank the clerk who returned the gloves and invites Therese to lunch. Therese visits Dannie and he kisses her, but she becomes uncomfortable and leaves.
Carol invites Therese to her home in New Jersey. She stops to purchase a Christmas tree, and Therese takes candid photographs of her. Harge arrives unexpectedly to take Rindy to Florida for Christmas; he becomes suspicious of Therese, as Carol had an affair years before with her friend Abby. Therese witnesses their argument. After Rindy leaves, a distressed Carol takes Therese to the train station so she can return home.
Carol calls to apologize to Therese and they meet at her apartment, where Carol surprises her with a suitcase containing a gift of a Canon camera and film. Carol has learned that Harge is petitioning the judge to consider a "morality clause" against her, threatening to expose her homosexuality and give him full custody of Rindy. She decides to take a road trip to escape the stress of the divorce proceedings and invites Therese to join her. Richard accuses Therese of being infatuated with Carol and predicts Carol will soon tire of her. The two argue and their relationship comes to an end. On the second night of the trip, Therese meets a traveling salesman, Tommy Tucker.
On New Year's Eve, Carol and Therese kiss for the first time and have sex. The next morning, they discover that Tucker is actually a private investigator Harge hired to obtain evidence against Carol. Carol confronts Tucker, threatening him at gunpoint, but he claims to have already sent tape recordings to Harge. Carol and Therese turn back. The next day, in Chicago, Therese learns that Carol has flown home to fight for custody of her daughter, having asked Abby to drive Therese home. Abby gives her a letter from Carol. Back at home, Therese telephones Carol, but knowing that she risks losing custody of Rindy if she continues her relationship with Therese, Carol hangs up.
Therese creates a portfolio of her photographs and gets a job at The New York Times. In the meantime, Carol has been seeing a psychotherapist as a condition of the divorce settlement. During a confrontational meeting in mid-April with divorce lawyers, Carol suddenly admits to the truth of what the tapes contain and refuses to deny her sexuality. To avoid going to court and the likelihood of a public scandal, she tells Harge that he can have custody of Rindy if he allows her regular visits.
Carol writes to Therese, and they meet in the lounge of the Ritz Tower Hotel. Carol reveals she is going to work for a furniture house and has taken an apartment on Madison Avenue. Therese declines Carol's invitation to live with her. Carol tells Therese that she is meeting associates in the Oak Room, and that if she changes her mind, they can have dinner. Therese remains still and Carol says, "I love you." They are interrupted by Jack, a colleague who has not seen Therese in months, and Carol departs.
Therese accepts Jack's ride to a party, but finds she cannot connect with anyone. She leaves for the Oak Room. She scans the diners and sees Carol at a table. Therese hesitates, then walks toward Carol. Their eyes meet. Carol gazes at Therese with a smile that slowly grows.
Cast
Production Development Carol is based on Patricia Highsmith's 1952 semi-autobiographical romantic novel The Price of Salt. The book was originally published under the pseudonym "Claire Morgan" by Coward-McCann after Highsmith's publisher Harper & Brothers rejected it. In 1990, Highsmith agreed to republish with Bloomsbury Publishing under her own name, and retitled it Carol. It had been inspired by an encounter in 1948 between Highsmith and a blonde woman wearing a mink coat, Kathleen Wiggins Senn, while she was working as a Christmas season salesgirl at the toy department of Bloomingdale's in New York. That evening she wrote an eight-page outline, which she developed some weeks later and had completed by 1951. The character of Therese Belivet was based on Highsmith herself. Senn inspired the character of Carol Aird, but its template was inspired by Highsmith's relationships with two former lovers, Philadelphia socialite Virginia Kent Catherwood and psychoanalyst Kathryn Hamill Cohen. Catherwood lost custody of her daughter in a high-profile divorce that involved secret tape recordings of her and her female lover.
London-born, New York–based producer Dorothy Berwin was initially attached to the project in 1996, owning the rights to the novel. She enlisted then-playwright Phyllis Nagy to write the screenplay on the recommendation of her London agent. Nagy, who was a friend of Highsmith, wrote the first draft of the script in 1997. Highsmith had suggested to Nagy that she adapt one of her novels. According to Nagy, Highsmith was not confident that the novel could be made into a "satisfying" film because of its "intense, subjective point of view". Nagy decided to adapt the script to ensure its fidelity to the source material, remarking, "I felt a strange responsibility to take it, and to make sure that it wasn't screwed up in some fundamental way, because she so disliked many of the screen adaptations of her work."
While searching for investors, Nagy and Berwin learned that the characters' homosexuality was not as much of an obstacle as that they were women. "Having two women leads was the issue", Nagy noted. In 2015, Berwin said that, in those days, it was a risky idea to play the role of Carol. "As a project it came together with Cate Blanchett. You needed to always start with her role". Film4 Productions and Tessa Ross financed the development of the film and kept it alive through the years, as it "underwent a decade-plus of revision under various directors and investors"—including Hettie MacDonald, Kenneth Branagh, Kimberly Peirce, John Maybury, and Stephen Frears—until the project completely stalled. The long delay was a result of struggles with funding, rights, and trepidations about a film with a gay theme and two female leads. "During its development, there was a very different kind of lesbian or gay movie that got financed", Nagy said. "They were very agenda or issue driven, and this was not. In fact it insists on not being that in order to make the point. I would talk about that with financiers, and I could see them glaze over."
Nagy said it was important that the screenplay be authentic to the early 1950s. "There was a different protocol then, a different etiquette, a different way people related to each other physically", she said. "It does you no service to spoonfeed a contemporary audience their own emotional codes and value systems." While various directors and investors had input to the script during its long gestation period, Nagy rejected suggestions that Carol or Therese "should feel guilty about being gay and suffer some kind of breakdown scene about it." "What I knew going in to the adaptation", Nagy said, "was that Pat's lack of psychologizing about Carol and Therese's sexual attraction, and ultimately their love, had to be maintained. It could not be corrupted by an impulse to indulge in any number of dramatic narrative clichés about guilt concerning one's sexuality or the like."
Nagy set the adaptation several years later than the novel is set, so that "the dawn of the Eisenhower administration and the rise of HUAC could be front and center". One of the challenges was translating the subjective and limited third-person viewpoint, where the narrator "sits on the shoulder of Therese and makes regular advances into (and retreats from) her head"; Carol is thus largely seen through Therese's fanatical prism. Nagy was initially apprehensive about the narrative structure, considering "there's no character of Carol. She's a ghost appropriately, as she should be, in the novel", adding that she was "overwhelmed by the task of trying to come up with the visual equivalent for it structurally." She decided to split the point of view and shift perspectives from Therese to Carol, as "the point of view is always with the more vulnerable party". She made Therese a photographer instead of a set designer, allowing her "to be seen moving from objects to people", which she likened to Highsmith as Therese is a "clear stand-in" for the author. Nagy drew from her personal knowledge of Highsmith for Therese, describing one of Therese's lines, "I started taking pictures of people because my friend says I have to be more interested in humans", as the epitome of Highsmith: "that ability to step outside of life and comment on it before participating in it". For Carol, she took inspiration from Grace Kelly's character in Rear Window (1954). Nagy had freedom in "inventing a life for [Carol], for whom, basically, we knew the outline of what was going on." Once she was able to understand the inner life of Carol, and her motivations, the character became easy to write. Nagy aimed to "focus on the nature of what it's like to fall in love from two points of view", and show the characters "just behaving ... not inhabiting positions."