"Therese" (Rooney Mara) is pretty unfulfilled, clerking in a department store that's frequented by the far more interesting "Carol" (Cate Blanchett). Their first meeting ignites a spark, and that spark quite quickly takes over both of their lives as the story unfolds and there develops an inter-dependency between the women. The latter is married to the wealthy "Harge" (Kyle Chandler) but it's an hollow arrangement that is coming to an end in the divorce court - their daughter together proving to be quite an important pawn in those proceedings. "Therese" has a long-term boyfriend "Richard" (Jake Lacy) who wants to settle down and get married - so both have much to lose as their relationship becomes more important and intimate. "Harge" has shrewdly inserted a morality clause into their proposed shared custody arrangement and is none too shy of resorting to some fairly underhand methods of tracking his wife's activities to prove that she isn't fit to have any access at all to their child. We also have to consider the closeness of the friendship between "Carol" and her best friend "Abby" (Sarah Paulson) and by mid way through the internecine complexities of their lives they risk leaving everyone with nothing. It's a romance, this, but largely devoid of sentimentality. A love story that is more visceral in nature, where one love is essentially climbing on top of another for supremacy over the heart and the head! It's Mara who does most of the heavy lifting, her character seems the more plausibly conflicted; but Blanchett delivers well as the desperate mother increasingly hemmed in by circumstance little of her making. The film looks great, the production design and Carter Burwell's period score adding a richness to a theme that offers us some intricate characters and scenarios that are anything but straightforward. It's maybe just a little too dialogue heavy - there's a lot of verbiage - but that's incidental. It's still a classy piece of cinema.
