The best movie characters tend to stay with you after the closing credits, and in Carolina Caroline, Samara Weaving gives us one that really lingers. As a Texas dreamer turned lovestruck outlaw in Adam Carter Rehmeier’s renegade road movie, Weaving balances romantic abandon and cool criminality in a hat-tip to the American cinema mythology of young lovers careening into fugitive transgression.
If Arthur Penn’s 1967 classic Bonnie and Clyde remains the blueprint, Carolina Caroline confirms notions of lawbreaking lovers as an ever-durable movie escape. From a screenplay by Tom Dean, director Rehmeier (Dinner in America) infuses this time-tested formula with emotional immediacy, and stars Weaving and Kyle Gallner lend a modern vitality echoing the impulsive chemistry Dunaway and Beatty made archetypal more than a half-century ago.
Weaving, the Australian-born actress known for committed, versatile turns in both genre (Ready or Not, Borderline) and prestige (Three Billboards Out of Ebbing Missouri, Babylon) pictures, finds her career best role as one Caroline Daniels, a small-town Texan whose job at a roadside convenience store affords a chance meeting with a charismatic, “just passing through” drifter in denim named Oliver (Gallner), who cons the cashier before disappearing down the road in his classic, baby-blue Chevy Chevelle.
Caroline may be small-town, but she’s also perceptive and restless, and after the pair’s second encounter at the local honky tonk and a come-hither moonlight dip in a secluded quarry, a charged magnetism ignites. “So, what do you do?” She asks. Oliver submerges. But after he explains his moral indifference to petty cons and a bit of slow-dancing at the local roadhouse, Caroline surmises that learning the tricks of his trade might be her ticket to a wider world; hers is a classic self-expulsion from the cocoon of small-town life. Oliver’s world is one of analyzing human behavior, building trust and then making a score. Caroline figures she’d like to learn something about that.
Bidding goodbye to her devoted dad (Jon Gries), she rides shotgun across the American southeast and headlong into good trouble. This first hour of Carolina Caroline is intoxicating—detailed character-building, steamy romance and role-playing hustles, from short-change scams to swindling savings accounts to retail boosts. An immensely watchable movie duo, quick study Caroline and ace operator Oliver so draw us to them that we almost forget the long arm of the law is never far behind—especially after Caroline’s bank heist spree becomes regional infamy, curdling the exhilaration.
Dean’s screenplay gives the pair plenty of time to develop as likable young people seeking a better hand but quickly get in over their heads. Together onscreen, Weaving and the welcome Gallner (Strange Darling, Smile), who makes Oliver more vulnerable than he first appears, are so striking in their love on the lam that we root for them to make a clean getaway, perhaps to Ecuador, of which Caroline’s father has always dreamed. Mainly, we wish for them to be in another film genre that could spare them the fatalism defining this one. In their most resonant exchange, Caroline wonders, “How do you know if we’re good people pretending to be bad, or bad ones pretending to be good?” Both stars exude a white-hot chemistry that makes the film’s doomed late stretches—particularly during a climactic scene set in a beer-soaked country dive, as news footage of the pair flashes on television screens nearby—sincere and heartbreaking.
Like all good road movies, Carolina Caroline—filmed across rural Tennessee, doubling for a half-dozen southern states over 25 shooting days and a staggering 100 location set-ups—has both freewheeling propulsion and gritty Americana lyricism. Rehmeier atmospherically captures lonely, two-lane rural highways, unhurried rhythms of main street and the lived-in textures of roadside joints where the lovers knock back shots and beers to their favorite jukebox tunes. And the film’s soundtrack, a collection of 25 well-curated country and western cuts including Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton, Margo Cilker and Townes Van Zandt provides a tonal complement to the film’s outlaw romanticism.
The film’s late passages allow Weaving to lean into its drama fully. As Caroline endures a wounding encounter with the bar hound mother who abandoned her as a baby—played by a ferocious Kyra Sedgwick—Weaving quietly essays a lifetime of hope instantly dashed. The astonishing Sedgwick, seated on a barstool for a marathon single scene, vividly plays Caroline’s hard-drinking, rough-living “mom” as cruelly unapologetic grotesquerie. And in a shock encounter with a curious police officer, Caroline’s distress becomes one of Weaving’s most finely judged moments.
Caroline Daniels is quite a movie creation, and early on Weaving channels the spirit of an early Taylor Swift, Tim McGraw-era country-girl in her appeal—unguarded and distinctly small-town, the sort of unselfconscious local beauty who has yet to realize that she’s world-class. Later, after Caroline morphs into a bandit in a red leather minidress and bobbed Louise Brooks wig, pistol-packing cool under pressure, we’re seeing the kind of all-in star turn Weaving clearly has been holding out on us to deliver. She pours everything she’s got into the year’s most endearing screen character.
Highly recommended.
4 stars
