We’ve already mentioned that Patricia Highsmith’s novel, The Price of Salt, is a particular favorite lesbian novel of ours. So it doesn’t surprise us that after it had been adapted, the movie Carol recently received the Best Picture Award from the New York Film Critics Circle.
Not only did Carol score the Best Picture Award, it also gained director Todd Haynes an award for Best Director from the critics’ group.
The movie Carol, based on a classic book
First published in 1952, Patricia Highsmith’s novel, The Price of Salt (later renamed as Carol), is a novel of lesbian romance in 1950s’ New York.
Highsmith published this book under a pseudonym because of the story’s lesbian content and it immediately fell out of print. However, it soon became an underground feminist lesbian classic.
For this adaptation, the movie stars Cate Blanchett as Carol Aird, a housewife who meets and has an affair with Rooney Mara’s Therese Belivet, a shop clerk and photographer.
Neither Blanchett and Mara won for their roles– but Andrew o’Hehir of Salon pointed out that Blanchett and Mara gave such stellar performances that the two actresses cancelled each other out for the Best Actress Award.
Instead, Michael Keaton won as best actor for Spotlight and Saoirse Ronan as best actress in Brooklyn.
Meanwhile, Kristen Stewart won a Best Supporting Actress award for her part in Clouds of Sils Maria while Mark Rylance took Best Supporting Actor for Bridge of Spies.
The movie Carol garners acclaim
Aside from winning accolades for Best Picture and Best Director, Carol also managed to dominate the awards by winning two others– Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography (Phyllis Nagy and Edward Lachman, respectively).
Nagy, in fact, took 19 years since she wrote the first draft of the screenplay to get this movie out.
More importantly, the movie deserves the awards it reaps because, as Carol producer Stephen Woolley puts it: “Todd Haynes’ films are still challenging contemporary mores and issues. Scratch the beautiful surface of his cinematography — or design, or costumes, or beautifully chosen music and inspired scores — and his films are contemporary, fresh and as relevant today as any documentary or news story ripped from the headlines.”
Likewise, reviewer Tim Robey of The Telegraph wrote: “Carol is gorgeous, gently groundbreaking, and might be the saddest thing you’ll ever see. More than hugely accomplished cinema, it’s an exquisite work of American art, rippling with a very specific mid-century melancholy, understanding love as the riskiest but most necessary gamble in anyone’s experience.”
It would be interesting to see how the movie Carol will do as the awards season rolls around in the next few months.