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 raw tenderness 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-day 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-dance courting 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 caring single 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 to retail boosts. A supremely inviting 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.
Weaving and the welcome Gallner (Strange Darling, Smile), who performs with genuine warmth, 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. Really, we wish for them to be in another film that could spare them the fatalism defining this genre. Dean’s screenplay gives them plenty of time early to develop as likable young people seeking a better hand in life, and quickly get in over their heads. 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?” Together, they exude a white-hot chemistry that makes the film’s doomed late stretches—particularly during a poignant climactic scene set in a beer-soaked country dive as their images flash on television screens nearby—sincere and heartbreaking.
Like all good road movies, Carolina Caroline—filmed entirely in 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 and the unhurried rhythms of main street, and the lived-in authenticity 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 bang-up country and western cuts from Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton, Margo Cilker, Townes Van Zandt and others provides a tonal complement to the film’s anarchic tenderness.
Late in the film, as Caroline endures a wounding encounter with the mother who abandoned her as a baby—played by a ferocious Kyra Sedgwick—Weaving masterfully essays a lifetime of hope instantly dashed. And Sedgwick, seated on a barstool for a marathon single scene, plays Caroline’s hard-drinking, rough-living, “mom” as a cruelly unapologetic, bar-hound grotesquerie. And in a shocking encounter with a too-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 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 bona fide 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
