Love Story

CAROL (A-minus) - Stylish director Todd Haynes drops the fussiness and forgoes a writing credit to present a warm, intimate, rather chaste love story between two women in the early 1950s.

Cate Blanchett stars as the title character, a rich wife trapped in a loveless marriage, living in a mansion in upstate New York ("the country"). One day during the holidays she visits a department store and takes a fancy to a cute shopgirl wearing a Santa's hat, Therese (Rooney Mara). Carol leaves her gloves behind, Therese returns them, and a fascination between the two of them builds.

The pedigreed Carol is always dressed and coifed to the nines, smoking elegantly, and dominating any room she's in with a confident flounce. Therese (with a short e in the second syllable) is a mousy amateur photographer from an immigrant background. She has a bland boyfriend, Richard (Jake Lacy from last season's "Girls"), who doesn't float her boat.

Carol and Therese, with a significant disparity in ages and styles, make for an unlikely pair. But since when is love a mathematical equation? The start to hang out together, casually. And when Carol's marriage blows up into a custody battle over her daughter, she decides to take a road trip, and Therese accepts an invitation to tag along. What follows is a tender story of a deepening, though mostly unspoken, bond between the women, as Carol's ghosts threaten to catch up to her. Just one love scene (ardently rendered) occurs throughout the movie.

Haynes presented "Mildred Pierce" on HBO in 2011 and made his mainstream splash in 2002 with another period piece (and another intense actress), "Far From Heaven" with Julianne Moore. Whereas that latter movie (which aimed to tackle race relations in 1950s Connecticut) reeked of artificiality and was starved of true emotion, "Carol" feels mature, raw and authentic. Haynes, as usual, is meticulous in his period detail, but not to the point of being overtly fastidious. He doesn't have to traffic in italics anymore in order to re-create a time and place.

Little touches are nice here. There's a close-up of a calendar notation in a datebook, accurately rendering Sunday, December 21, 1952, in just the proper font. A radio report emanates from a hotel office announcing the death of Hank Williams on January 1, 1953. A TV broadcast of Dwight Eisenhower's inaugural speech drones in the background of a lunch gathering, and we pick up snippets of his upbeat, Kennedyesque boasts of a modern, enlightened world -- a device that provides sweetly subtle irony to the tale of a forbidden love that wouldn't be legitimized until the Obama administration.

But it's not the narrative or the scenery that drive this story. It's the deep yearning and unorthodox connection between the women. (Some will find the pairing far-fetched; fair enough, but I'd rather give in to the romantic notion.) Blanchett is fabulous, as expected, but her character is a bit of an art piece, a narrative device. It is Mara (light-years beyond "Side Effects" and "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo") who takes over the film and grounds it from Therese's perspective. She burns with the need to break free from her vanilla world and indulge a feeling that she prays will be more than a mere impulse. Carol is merely a Christmas tree on which Therese can hang her ornaments.

"Carol" captures the excitement of new love in a fashion not unlike two other gay dramas -- Andrew Haigh's "Weekend" and the French epic "Blue Is the Warmest Color." All three, refreshingly, make gender and sexuality beside the point. Love, flirtation, and that first spark are all universal.

The surprise here is how Rooney Mara not only holds her own with one of the era's great actresses, but also inhabits her character as the fulcrum of the film. The title of this film is rather ironic. It really should be called "Therese."

BONUS TRACKS
A lovely song that Therese noodles out on the piano, Billie Holiday's "Easy Living":


And this jaunty joint adds an air of playfulness -- "One Mint Julep" by the Clovers: