carol (d todd haynes, w. phyllis nagy, patricia highsmith)

Carol is a polished adaptation of Highsmith’s novel, which feels as though it ticks all the boxes without ever catching fire. The film is set in similar territory to Haynes’ earlier Far From Heaven, but it has a more muted feel. Like the earlier film, it deals with the crossing of taboos in post-war USA; but the colours are less vibrant and the melodrama is toned down. There are no obvious flaws, but this might be a flaw in itself: in spite of the transgressive nature of the relationship between Blanchett’s Carol and Mara’s Therese, it never feels as though they are running the same kind of risks that Moore and Haysbert ran in FFH. This could be down to the adaptation of the source material, Highsmith’s novel. The film opens with a self-evident homage to Brief Encounter, (albeit this is later revealed to be a tricksy device), but where the almost unseemly desperation of Trevor Howard’s passion shines through and propels that movie onto a heightened emotional plane, Blanchett always seems to hold things together in a polished performance which might have benefited from being more unhinged. When she threatens someone with a gun, it never seems likely that the gun will go off.

 

far from heaven (w&d todd haynes)

Todd Haynes achieves something complex in his Sirk homage. He bestows pathos on characters who at first seem laughable, even absurd. The film was released in 2002 and perhaps the lens through which an audience might watch the film has changed over the course of the last 25 years. Moore’s Cathy struggles to cope with her husband Frank’s gay infidelity,  The tone is melodramatic. Moore’s impeccably coiffed hair seems as much of a character as either of her children. Quaid’s Frank breaks down and weeps and then pinballs around like an archetypal repressed North American bourgeois. Everything is so on point that it feels like a pastiche, as indeed it is. It’s impossible not to laugh at these characters and their cliched fifties behaviour. Surely this is a world that we have left behind? Dennis Haysbert’s Raymond is the down-to-earth antidote to all this. A man whose solid decency transcends the boundaries of race and class. No wonder Cathy falls for him. All the same, this world and its characters feel like a caricature. Then something remarkable happens, in large part through the performances of Moore and Haysbert. The characters seem to slip the pastiche net. Their emotional distress touches us. The film becomes a film about love. its power and its limitations. These emotions are, of course, timeless.

Twenty five years later, even those elements of the film that seem wilfully contrived suddenly feel far more plausible. Conservatism is back. Prejudice is back. The closet is back. It seems like we’re slipping back into the absurd, divided world of the fifties. 

I'm Not There (dir Todd Haynes)

It's several weeks since I frittered away another afternoon in the build-up to Christmas with Haynes' take on the biopic in the depths of Soho. My memories of the movie are already splintered, erratic, imprecise.

Which could be exactly what they're supposed to be. The conceit at the heart of the film, that Dylan is played by half a dozen different actors, is an adventurous hook. Intellectually, it's an effective vantage point. No biopic can capture the complete essence of the star it portrays, so to acknowledge the fiction, and explore it, is a bold but strangely sensible decision.

Haynes knows he's scoring rock 'n roll points by casting a black kid or an australian actress as the legend. The Blanchett scenes ultimately seemed overblown, in the vein of Velvet Goldmine; whilst the Franklin scenes strived for and just about achieved the right level of winsome charm. Every viewer is going to walk away with their own favourite from the assorted Dylan selection; and every fan is likely to find one of the incarnations more convincing than the others. The conceit is liable to be as effective as it is counter-productive - there were some Dylans I was waiting to see more of, and others I could have done without.

All of which is part of the game Haynes is playing with the viewer. The only trouble with all this is the knowingness of the game's author. When Dylan is knowing, it is within the context of an audience which has travelled his journey with him - he's earned his right to tell it like it is. Haynes doesn't yet have that authority, no matter how fine a filmmaker he might be. We end up participating in his Godardian jeux d'esprit, without quite knowing what we're going to get out of it, or whether it's worth our while. Unlike Dylan's songs, there never seems to be any real body behind the film's games, or anything at stake. When Dylan sings: 'It was gravity that pulled us down and destiny which broke us apart', the line is endowed with the power of someone who sounds like they've been to that place we all believe we've been to at some point.

At no point does Haynes connect with his audience in the same way. As a result his film is entertaining but rarely compelling, and another that suffers by comparison with the voice it's paying homage to.

Having said which, the memories are now as splintered as the movie itself; and I did love the Black Panther scene.