Carol (2015) on Netflix
In 1952 Manhattan, Therese Belivet clerks at Frankenberg's and dreams of becoming a photographer. Carol Aird, a customer going through a divorce, thanks her for mailing back a pair of gloves.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.3/10155,039 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes94%
Trailer
Plot summary
At Christmas in 1952, Therese Belivet works as a clerk at Frankenberg's, a Manhattan department store, and hopes to make her living as a photographer. Carol Aird shops there for a doll for her daughter, Rindy, and buys a model train set that Therese suggests instead. Carol leaves her gloves on the counter; Therese mails them to her, and Carol telephones the store to thank her and invites her to lunch. Carol is in the middle of a divorce from her husband, Harge. Therese's boyfriend, Richard, wants her to marry him and go with him to France.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Carol (2015)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Patricia Highsmith's novel came out of a single encounter in 1948, when she was working the Christmas season in the toy department of Bloomingdale's in New York and served a blonde woman in a mink coat. She wrote an eight-page outline that same evening.
- The script passed through directors including Hettie MacDonald, Kenneth Branagh, Kimberly Peirce, John Maybury and Stephen Frears before stalling. Phyllis Nagy and producer Dorothy Berwin found investors balked less at the lesbian story than at two female leads: "Having two women leads was the issue", Nagy said.
- Rooney Mara had already turned Therese down once, after finishing The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, because she was exhausted and unconfident. When Todd Haynes came to her again she was in a different head space and called signing on a no-brainer.
- A Canadian financing deal would have put this New York story in Montreal. Producer Elizabeth Karlsen remembered making a film in Cincinnati 27 years earlier that was set in 1950s New York, researched the city and found it had barely changed in decades.
- Rooney Mara shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes and was up for Best Actress at the Golden Globes, yet The Weinstein Company entered her for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress so she and Cate Blanchett would not compete. Mara made her displeasure clear to The New York Times.
- ABC refused a prime-time commercial using a snippet of the nude scene, forcing a re-edited trailer, and in 2016 Delta Air Lines was attacked for an in-flight version with the love scenes cut. Screenwriter Phyllis Nagy pointed out that American and United carried the full film.
- In March 2016 the British Film Institute named Carol the best LGBT film ever made, in a poll of more than one hundred film experts covering over 80 years of cinema.
