Why Carol is the best Christmas movie
Todd Haynes’ lesbian romance captures the joy and the melancholy of the holiday season
Image: Graphic: Natalie Peeples Film Features Carol
Once you get past the troll at the entrance of the tunnel in the form of a banner reading “The Weinstein Company,” Todd Haynes’ 2015 love story Carol takes you by the heavy-wool-draped shoulders and moodily ushers you into a two-hour wrenching of the heart. It is, somehow, the best holiday movie in current existence.
Based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 lesbian romance novel The Price Of Salt, Carol stars Rooney Mara as Therese Belivet, a seasonal shopgirl with aspirations to live a life that looks like anything other than the one she’s currently living. Cate Blanchett is the title character: Carol, a woman on the verge of divorcing her husband, at the end of one lesbian affair and the onset of another. Annual appointment viewing for anyone who likes to be horny and sad at the same time, Carol is like having a bit of a cold while laying in a room that’s a bit too warm and looking at a vintage snow globe, all while being a little bit gay. In other words, it feels like Christmas.
Carol is set in the New York City of the 1950s. Its first half takes place during the pre-Christmas bustle, dreary or dreamy depending on your mindset. When she first meets Carol, Therese is working behind the counter in a toy room at Frankenberg’s department store, using a display of dolls as a barrier between herself and the patrons with either too much money to spend on the holidays or not enough. Shaking her from her privileged ennui is the initial appearance of Carol, with her tidy blonde bob and cold leather gloves that probably smell like cinnamon gum from being in her bag.
Five minutes earlier, the only highlight of Therese’s day was watching a selection of toy trains make their somber route to nowhere. Now she’s filled with Christmas spirit, suddenly eager to insert herself in seasonal activities: handwriting correspondences, selecting albums to give Carol as gifts, photographing her crush beneath a flurry of snowflakes at a Christmas tree stand. All the while Therese knows that, like one of those snowflakes, none of this can possibly last. As with Christmas itself, the ecstatic high of an unrealistic love—mixed with the expectations that hover over it all—is enough to break your heart. It’s also enough to keep you chasing it your whole life, the same way we chase Christmas cheer every December.
“I love Christmas,” Carol wistfully tells Therese during their first encounter in the store. “Wrapping presents and all that. And then somehow you wind up overcooking the turkey anyway.” What the movie understands, much better than time-honored classics like Planes, Trains And Automobiles or Home Alone, is the joy and the sadness of carving out a little moment of holiday cheer separate from the non-holiday drudgery of normal daily life. The heavy weight of self-inflicted expectation to have a perfect Christmas is like toothpick holes in a freshly baked cake: something perfect inevitably botched.
It’s in the weeks prior to Christmas that Carol and Therese become entwined in each other’s lives, in their shared but not altogether vocalized sense of what they never knew they desperately needed. This is a time when the world is shrouded in a cold illumination, pulled out of melancholy by the twinkle of Christmas lights dutifully strung everywhere. People get invited to parties they don’t want to attend, but they go because the feeling of having missed them would be too depressing. And it’s not unusual to return to the office during this time reeking of Phillip Morris cigarettes and one too many dry martinis.
Carol tracks the two lovers across the season, into the post-Christmas week where Carol and Therese’s relationship has gone past their first sexual encounter and into the real problems of life. Their love truly lives within the unbearable sadness of the day the Christmas tree comes down. The vibe from here is tearful train rides home, sitting with a lap full of opened gifts, driven to the brink of crippling despair in some small town like Waterloo, Iowa. No warm oven. No bubbly drinks. Nothing festive to look forward to. Just an unrolled blanket of Monday mornings.
If you’re of a delicate nature, there are Christmas movies for you: childlike offerings like A Charlie Brown Christmas, or Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. Traditionalists can have Miracle On 34th Street and It’s A Wonderful Life. And if you’re just in it for a good yuletide laugh, there’s always A Christmas Story and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. These relative classics are safe, sure bets for maintaining a seasonal framework while shielding yourself from any hard feelings. But make no mistake about it, Christmas wants to hurt you.
What cements Carol as not only a powerfully sentimental Christmas movie worth revisiting (at least) once a year but also a strong contender for the best Christmas movie period is that, from top to bottom, it spills it all out. Every last sticky gulp of intoxication that Christmas has to offer, regretful hangover included. It pulls you down into the wintry mix of salty and sweet euphoria that an intense whirlwind romance and Christmas have in common. It takes you high up into the perfume-counter-scented clouds, plummets you quick so that your heart beats in your neck, and then knocks you down on your ass so hard that the puffy ball at the end of your Santa hat goes from right to left. Now that’s a holiday film to fall in love with.
Towards the end of Carol, after the the holiday high has worn off and the dead zone drip of early January has taken hold, Carol herself—the mascot for the season—writes a letter to Therese, stating her case for why, after an interlude apart, she envisions them taking another crack at things. Carol doesn’t want to see their love recede into distant memory, forever frozen within one of the aforementioned snow globes we mentioned at the beginning of this, intended to be experienced and packed away. She writes of a vision she has of the two of them as “lives stretched out ahead of us, a perpetual sunrise.” And Therese takes the bait, just as we do every December 1st when we haul out that same dusty box of Christmas decorations, ready to experience all the holy jolly heartbreak all over again. This time, it’s going to be perfect.
58 Comments
Carol was a movie that I did not expect to love as much as I did. There was just something there where it managed to have it not just be a love story between two women, but have it portray an efficient character arc for both and say something. It would have been easy for it to bury itself in that sadness, but it didn’t.
Especially the final scene still sticks with me and how they managed to neatly turn around the dynamic with Therese now making the choice to stand there and be seen.
I want to love romantic movies more than I do, but I just find so often that they don’t convince me that the love between the characters is real. ‘Carol’ is different, and I think a big part of it is, as you say, that there is a character arc for the two leads that feels genuine. I could watch it any time and still get swept up in the romance.
If you’re of a delicate nature, there are Christmas movies for you: childlike offerings like A Charlie Brown Christmas, or Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. Traditionalists can have Miracle On 34th Street and It’s A Wonderful Life…These relative classics are safe, sure bets for maintaining a seasonal framework while shielding yourself from any hard feelings. It feels a little disingenuous to suggest that none of these “classics” deal with “hard feelings.” Sure, they resolve with more or less happy endings. That said—seasonal depression/anxiety, social ostracism/bullying to loss of innocence/dealing with dementia, loss of faith/suicide—it’s almost like Christmas melancholy has been an essential part of the genre since Dickens started it more than 150 years ago. (Yes, I’m leaving the comedies out on purpose, although there are potentially troubling aspects of those movies as well.)
And for what it’s worth, I definitely love Carol way more than any of those other films!
It’s also kind of wild to list It’s A Wonderful Life as a movie that will shield you from hard feelings as that movie is dark, y’all.
I mean, they are all, to some extent or another! But It’s a Wonderful Life definitely wears its darkness on its sleeve.
OT: Happy Holidays, lovein! I enjoyed our conversation the other day, and I hope you and yours are having a good day.
Thanks, you too!
it reads as if someone is trying to tell us they havent seen its a wonderful life without telling us they havent seen its a wonderful life
Heck, Christmas Vacation is about a man desperately struggling to achieve the “perfect” Christmas in the face of both family tensions / hostility, the over-inflated expectations of the season and a capitalist system which takes his labours for granted and begrudges rewarding him with even a pittance for his efforts even as it grows rich and fat off them.
Even the Garfield And Friends Christmas special had a moment in which Grandma mentions that “this is the time of the year that she misses her late husband most.”
It feels a little disingenuous to suggest that none of these “classics” deal with “hard feelings.”No kidding. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer digs in hard on alienation from one’s peers, not just in Rudolph’s case but also with Dennis the would-be elf dentist (a cousin of mine thinks that Dennis is subtly gay-coded, which could be true) and the Island of Misfit Toys. “There’s Always Tomorrow” is a deeply sweet and sad song about disappointment. And Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town is a subtly subversive story about rebel Kris Kringle (who even grows a beard for a disguise) sticking it to the Burgermeister Meisterburger and his tyrannical anti-toy policies. Romeo Muller, who wrote these specials for Rankin/Bass, was not fucking around.
I also know a lot of people convinced the “D” Herbie wants cannot be found in “D.D.S.”
“Carol: she’s not like other Christmas movies!”
Well, you will shoot your eye out, loveinthetimeofcoronavirus.
I think we all know what’s really the greatest Christmas movie…
Excuse me but that looks nothing like the National Lampoon’s Christmas vacation poster!
This Christmas: Don’t Take Off the Cum-Belt
No. But it could have been: such a wasted opportunity.
Seems a bit disingenuous to call out Weinstein’s awfulness but ignore Highsmith’s.
Might have something to do with the fact that she’s been dead for almost three decades.
Now I know the half-life of virulent antisemitism. Thanks, dirtside!
If you want to litigate Highsmith’s political views, be my guest, but if you’re not going to give more than snarky commentary, don’t expect more than snarky replies.
I dunno about this take, man. I am not generally one of those “person X’s known awfulness must be invoked every single time their work is discussed in perpetuity” kind of people. And yes, she’s dead.But also:1. Highsmith’s awfulness is, as far as I can tell, not actually that known, and maybe should be better known, particularly if we’re going to celebrate her work a lot. As a Lovecraft fan, I fully understand why he is never referenced without an accompanying mention of his prolific racism. Not sure that Highsmith should dodge that same bullet, even if her views were arguably far less integral to her work.2. Given that the novel on which Carol is based is semi-autobiographical, it seems reasonable to me to discuss the actual biography of the person who authored it, warts and all.3. Minimizing her antisemitism as a mere “political view” is not really a good look. She called the holocaust the “semicaust” because it didn’t get the job done. She broke up a dinner party once by derisively scribbling concentration camp-like numbers on her forearm. Google her name + antisemitism for further examples that may singe your eyebrows off. This was far more (and far worse) than mere politics (which might imply that she merely had a disagreement with the state of Israel or something).And last but not least—Highsmith actually authored this work, or the work upon which it was based, at any rate. All the Weinsteins did was buy the rights and distribute the movie; they weren’t even creatives on the project (source: https://www.advocate.com/film/2018/5/24/carol-producer-elizabeth-karlsen-confirms-weinstein-stole-credit). If it’s worth recoiling in horror just because that name is associated with the picture however tangentially, then it’s worth talking about Highsmith as well.
I get your viewpoint, but you seem to be reading a lot into my comment that wasn’t there. I said nothing about whether such an omission was justified; I merely pointed out a reason why the omission is unsurprising. It’s interesting that you assumed I was therefore okay with not mentioning it. Maybe don’t read so much into a snarky, sixteen-word comment.
Maybe don’t read so much into a snarky, sixteen-word comment.
Nah, I think they gave a thoughtful and informative response to your comment as it was written. If all you are admitting that you bring nothing to the table but weak snark, maybe you shouldn’t be butting into adult conversations?
The original comment was a single snarky sentence. My response to it was a single snarky sentence. And yet it deserves essay-length exegesis? Okay.
Sorry–I do post at great length sometimes. Just want to make my meaning clear and all that.
No worries; I believe you were writing in good faith, if perhaps a bit overeagerly. 😉
If all you are admitting that you bring nothing to the table but weak snarkEither A) you know this isn’t true and are just trying to be insulting, or B) you think this is true (it isn’t, as a cursory inspection of my posting history would demonstrate). Either way, this was a foolish statement to make.
I don’t think it’s interesting. The internet is overflowing with people mounting half-assed defenses of indefensible things, under guise of “just asking questions” or “just joking around, lighten up” or what have you. Your posts here read that way, to me. If you say that’s not what you meant, apologies.
It’s not what I meant, but I understand the impulse to assume that if A is critical of a thing B said, therefore A disagrees with the thing. This is a huge problem with online discourse, because it means that people read a huge amount into things that aren’t there. The canonical example is when a [party] politician proposes an idea, and another [same party member] criticizes the idea, and is then accused of all sorts of horrible things merely because they disagreed with someone who’s a member of the same party.I gave a critical reply to a statement about mentioning Highsmith’s antisemitism, so the assumption is that therefore I must think that the lack of mention in the article was good or justified. That is, self-evidently, total nonsense. I believe that reprehensible views by an artist damn well should be brought up when that artist’s work is being discussed. But instead of asking for clarification on a vague, snarky statement, everyone jumped in with impassioned defenses of Why I’m Wrong.
I gave a critical reply to a statement about mentioning Highsmith’s antisemitism, so the assumption is that therefore I must think that the lack of mention in the article was good or justified. That is, self-evidently, total nonsense.
I don’t find it to be entirely self-evident. For me, as I imagine for most people, it arises from pattern recognition. That is to say, inasmuch as you see a huge problem with online discourse in what I did (and you may be right about that!), I’m just responding in proportion to a different, related huge problem with online discourse. Namely, people play so many rhetorical games and hide their true meaning and intent behind jokes and trolling and weak, disingenuous denials that we are all forced much of the time to try to glean ACTUAL meaning and intent on our own. And many of us, I think, get pretty good at it. For the one time in ten that there are wires crossed (like here), there are nine other times that we end up skewering a troll who richly deserves it.Anyway, I think this mostly came down to me not reading the original comment as particularly snarky. You took it that way though and responded in kind. That initial tone probably determines a lot to a rando such as myself about what we read into your reply. Anyway, no hard feelings. 🙂
You seem like a BLAST at parties!
Nah. All I do is stand in a corner and spout cliches.
“But you forgot about THIS outrage”“Oh, so you’re fine with __________ which quietly kills ___________?!”“… but did you know that POC are affected 7% more?!”
The whole “melancholy amidst cheer” concept is an odd one; people always seem to talk about it as if the specific wintry, American context in which it exists is something universal, immutable, and eternal. There’s enormous pressure to Buy Lots of Stuff and to Be Merry, and rather than interrogate the system, we just bemoan our helplessness in its face.
Well, it’s comedic and a very silly song parody, but it does point out the dark side of the blatant commercialism of the holiday season:
So you’re saying…it was a Christmas Carol all along?
Santa there needs to upgrade his TV to 4k.
Santa’s TV is 8K, but from what I’ve been told if you don’t have enough holiday spirit it looks like an old-timey tube set.
[Insert obligatory “Die Hard is the best Christmas movie” comment here]
Let’s be honest: ‘Carol’ could only be improved by Therese throwing a guy out a window and saying, “Welcome to the party, pal!”
NOW I HAVE A SECRET LESBIAN LOVER. HO-HO-HO.
God, this film is such a little gem. It’s beautiful to look at, painfully well acted, a finely and not often enough told story. I often forget the Christmas element, though. Maybe I don’t associate Christmas films with this level of quality.
Hey AV Club. Hate straight people much?
I think what you meant to say was “I can’t enjoy a movie about straight white people because I’m insecure with myself”
Thanks to that headline, I finally realized that the film’s title is a pun. What can I say, I’m not the quickest sometimes.
If the Powers That Be at AVClub, Inc. ever wonder why readership is down, clicks are non-existent, and the few readers remaining complain that the articles are full of faux-woke, pretentious crap, they should be immediately directed to the article that suggests that “Carol” is the best Christmas movie ever. “Carol.” Heh. Of course it’s your opinion… but, ummm, ok. Let’s sit around the Christmas tree with family and a nice egg nog and watch fucking “Carol.” If I want bad feelings, I’ll just go with Billy Bob Thornton pissing on himself or Chevy Chase falling off his roof.
I’m hard noping on this one, because they cast a pair of straight actors to play a pair of queer characters. It’s got a built-in cultural expiration date.
i’m lukewarm on this film, but i wish sarah paulson had played the role of carol instead.
“Carol is like having a bit of a cold while laying in a room that’s a bit too warm and looking at a vintage snow globe, all while being a little bit gay. In other words, it feels like Christmas.”
Whose Christmas is anything remotely like that description? That honestly is the dumbest description I have ever heard. Who is this relatable to? semi-gay people with semi-colds in rooms that are too warm, and also contain vintage snow globes?? Seriously, WTF?
Carol is a gross movie with a massive power imbalance between the two characters. If you like it you are trash.
My film of choice last Christmas was the original 1973 Wicker Man. Which seems an odd choice, but it’s traditional and Celtic and ends with a bonfire.
My favorite scene was when Carol got on the radio and said “Ho ho ho, now I have a machine gun too”. Really hits me where I live.
are we going with that opening sentence? really?
What a strange girl you are. Flung out of space.Highsmith was a master of conjuring a sense of the most prickly, heartsick anticipation; a touch you both dread and long for, words unspoken, skittering heartbeats. Carol perfectly nails that feeling of maddening unsureness, the bone-deep melancholy, and the electric, swoon-worthy moments of connection. Perfect book, perfect movie.
I love your use of language in this piece, throughout. However, you can’t sacrifice FACT to flowers. See re:
“Towards the end of Carol, after the the holiday high has worn
off and the dead zone drip of early January has taken hold, Carol
herself—the mascot for the season—writes a letter to Therese, stating
her case for why, after an interlude apart, she envisions them taking
another crack at things. ….She writes of a vision she has of the two
of them as “lives stretched out ahead of us, a perpetual sunrise.”
The letter you’re quoting from is, in fact, her GOOD-BYE letter (presumably written in the wee morning hours of January 2—-still within the Twelve Days, so not after the holiday high has worn off!). It’s not a letter “envisioning them taking
another crack at thing”: it’s a “We’re Done, But Let’s Just Remember The Good Times AS IF They Went On and On.” It’s a letter that Carol *regrets* writing (as she indicates to Abby) because she wants “another crack”, and that letter summarily closed it off. It’s the reason that—-come the first blush of Spring—-she has to write *another* card (hand-delivered, “Class!”) to Therese, proposing the Tea Room meet-up.I, too, watch “Carol” every holiday season . . . but that letter, oy vey. When I first heard it, I thought it was so pretentious, it MUST be directly lifted from the book (or why include it?). Imagine my surprise, reading “Price of Salt” to discover not only is that letter not there, Carol leaves Therese completely forewarned! Seeing “Carol” the first time, I couldn’t believe my friends who said, “the book is better” . . . but they were right. Highsmith *rules*.