Carol

“Just when you think you can’t get any worse, you run out of cigarettes” 

Todd Haynes has previously demonstrated his expertise with character dramas in Far from Heaven and his miniseries Mildred Pierce. Now he reunites with his I’m Not There star, Cate Blanchett in Carol, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel of the same name. 

Christmas in the early 1950s. Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), an amateur photographer, is working in Frankenberg’s department store, calm amongst the chaos of the seasonal period. Across the room, an elegant older woman, Carol (Cate Blanchett) admires a model train set. The two get chatting and she orders the trainset. After Carol ‘accidentally’ leaves her gloves behind in the store, Therese mails them off. So begins a series of rendezvous between these two women, stuck in their individual unsatisfying relationships and each looking for something more intimate. 

This really is a slow-burn character drama, which might not be to everybody’s tastes. It takes its time to build nuanced characters, although the interactions between Carol and Therese escalate into a relationship a little too quickly to be entirely believable. Phyllis Nagy’s screenplay does an excellent job of exploring sexuality beyond the confines of the labels. It’s difficult to tell exactly where the two leads each sit on the broad spectrum of sexual identity - given their unfulfilled yet notable liaisons with men - but the definitions get swept aside to focus on a multi-layered relationship between two women that aren’t sure where they’re going with their lives. 

Set in the 1950s, Carol manages to be subtle in its portrayal of the era, by which I mean it doesn’t overdo it to the point of caricature as some recent period pieces have. The film was shot on 16mm film by cinematographer Edward Lachman, and the soft, warm image with unexpectedly dull colours mirrors the tone of the film. At times Carol even takes on aspects of film noir, an effective style for both the setting and the duplicitous aspects of the story. 

Blanchett is, as usual fantastic. Carol’s dry-wit and cynicism act as a shield to the fragility that we as

an audience see in her. Her difficult husband and divorce proceedings are only part of the problem as she seems to be hiding more about herself than at first glance, which turns out to be her lack of satisfaction in life. All of this comes across with subtlety and ease thanks to Blanchett’s devoted understanding of the art. 

Rooney Mara is just as good; Therese in a similar yet different way to Carol, has a vulnerable streak to her and has an innocence that comes out through things like her photography. Although it’s more of an aside, Therese’s photographic hobby, in the way that it’s developed (pun not intended) felt like a nod to the naval-gazing characters of French new wave films. Carol could have so easily become a melodrama, but - aside from one scene - it manages to stay grounded thanks largely to the two lead performances. 

Todd Haynes has developed another detailed character drama with Carol, thanks to a great screenplay and brilliant performances. However as I said it is very much a slow-burn film and for quite a while I lost focus. I feel that I’ll need to see this again to really pick up on the details.

The Big Short

It seems like a low-blow to make a devastatingly satirical look at events so closely linked to the Global Financial Crisis when it’s effects are still being felt around the world, but Adam McKay (creator of Anchorman, Step Brothers and The Other Guys) strikes an empathetic balance with The Big Short. 

The year is 2005 and Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a mathematical genius and hedge-fund manager realises that the stability of the U.S housing market is being undermined by high-risk subprime loans. Burry predicts the market has approximately two years before a crash and decides to bet against the housing market with credit default swaps. Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) hears of this and decides to get in on the game and, thanks to a misdialed phone call, alerts another hedge-fund manager, Mark Baum (Steve Carell) to the scheme. A pair of young investors find a booklet of Vennetts and also hope to make some money out of default swaps, enlisting their friend and retired banker Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) to help complete the transaction. 

The most crucial part of The Big Short is its focus on two shades of immorality. It pits those that recognise and take advantage of the housing market’s impending doom against the bankers that arrogantly continue to saturate the housing bubble. It doesn’t make it difficult to take sides - the four leads do at least have some empathy for those that will be hit worst by it - but that’s not really the point. It serves as a darkly enjoyable indictment of the financial industry’s greedy tunnel-vision. McKay creates an interesting focus on detail where he breaks the fourth wall with celebrities such as Anthony Bourdain, Selena Gomez and Margot Robbie explaining - or more precisely, dumbing-down - the financial terms operating within the scenes. Personally, these snippets didn’t particularly help me understand everything at play, but rather served to relax me enough into the story that I was happy to let the jargon go over my head. Of course the experience will be different for different viewers but I feel this was at least partly McKay’s intention. Otherwise he would have used Margot Robbie with a play-school diorama, not Margot Robbie in a bathtub. 

The four leads divide the film into different stories that really only slightly interweave as news of the scheme spreads, and most of the performances are great. The only issue with the way they emerge are the short backstories. They feel tacked-on, at times unnecessary and more crucially, jarringly break the satirical tone. Steve Carell is more-believable in this role than he was in Foxcatcher, and that’s not just because he’s constantly angry or that the comedic material is more to his style but because in that film he was so out of his own skin that I found it impossible not to just see a heavily disguised Steve Carell, whereas here he really makes Mark Baum his own. The same can’t be said about Gosling’s Jared Vennett, whose charismatic veneer can’t outweigh his belligerent lack of empathy. 

Christian Bale’s mildly-autistic performance is book-ended by a drumming heavy-metal admiration and a mathematical temperament. Like most of the leads, he has a refreshing honesty about him - particularly when he discusses with his investors via emails - and thankfully Bale doesn’t lean as heavily on the ‘rain man’ act as I had expected. Brad Pitt’s character is probably the most interesting in the movie, with his unusually subdued performance he portrays a man that has conflicting moral predicaments which become much more evident when the crash occurs. The Big Short undoubtedly takes influence from The Wolf of Wall Street, particularly in its willingness to break the fourth wall, but also in its editing style. McKay is not as heavy on the montages as Scorsese but its sense of hyperactivity is the same. Which is not to say that this is on par with Wolf but it is able to keep an audience’s attention through similar techniques. 

The Big Short proves that McKay can commit to satire with a strong sense of purpose. It catches the apathy of high-finance whilst still hinting at the human-suffering the crash causes, bolstered by some great performances from the leads.You’ll be laughing all the way through and feeling guilty about doing it.