Lesbian love tale gamble pays off
Oscar buzz greets Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara’s take on ’50s romance
NEW YORK — Oscar winner Cate Blanchett listens politely to an assessment of her perfectly poised 1950s society lady, Carol.
She considers the compliment and then responds to the praise smiling demurely.
“It’s the girdle,” says Blanchett during an exclusive Canadian interview. “I love the girdle.”
Obviously, you can take the Aussie out of Australia but not the self-deprecation. The truth is her detailed definition of the film’s title character is key, not to mention her involvement in getting the movie made.
It was Blanchett who championed Carol, the story of lesbian love based on the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt.
The Phyllis Nagy script had been languishing in development hell for almost 11 years. The narrative of the suburban upper-class Carol (Blanchett) getting intimate with a workingclass New York shop girl named Therese (Rooney Mara) couldn’t find backers until Blanchett signed on.
It helped that she persuaded her I’m Not There director Todd Haynes to join the Carol challenge. After all, he had reimagined other sorts of 1950s in the acclaimed film Far from Heaven and the TV miniseries Mildred Pierce.
“And Todd said, ‘Do you know Rooney Mara’s work?’ and I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ ” says Blanchett. “I said, ‘She’s amazing and makes some really interesting choices, and has a richness on screen.’ ”
As coincidence and good timing would have it, Mara had already read the Carol screenplay without prompting and enjoyed it, so persuading her was easier than Blanchett had anticipated.
“Rooney came on board and it was off to the races, but it’s always a risk,” says the 46-yearold actress, who was also a producer and an unofficial leader on set. “It’s a risk with any film, but particularly when the movie lives or dies on that one connection.”
The gamble seems to have paid off. Mara earned a Cannes Film Festival best actress award, and both Blanchett and Mara are being touted as early favourites to pick up Oscar nominations. Both have already picked up nominations from the Golden Globes (best actress for Blanchett, best supporting actress for Mara) and Screen Actors Guild (best actor for each).
Typically, Blanchett’s quick to give credit to Haynes for the positive reviews and the celebration of the portrayals.
“Todd is a great bringer together of people,” she says. “He puts all the ingredients on the table and then you assemble from that what you need.”
Besides focusing on the relationship, the actress believes the movie makes some subtle statements about the early evolution of women’s rights.
“That’s why I’m fascinated by the ’50s,” Blanchett says. “There was a whole explosion when the women stepped into industry for the men when they went to war.”
The Carol film takes place “when the women were thrust back into the home and suffered from the psychological and emotional inertia.”
It’s also a 1950s period rarely seen in film: “This was preEisenhower, post-World War Two — a spare time, pre-consumerism and the American boom, so Todd went back to the basics.”
And to inform her presence on camera, the director had Blanchett study the pictures of women snapped by photographers Ruth Orkin and Vivienne Meyer.
“Todd was very interested in that female gaze, which was revelatory to me,” Blanchett says. “It was the immediacy and the veracity of people just living.”
Meanwhile, Carol represents a Blanchett benchmark. It’s been 15 years between her movies of Highsmith books — the first was The Talented Mr. Ripley.
In those early days, she was a fresh- faced University of Melbourne graduate who had become a fixture in the Sydney theatre scene. Her Oscar nomination for 1998’s portrayal of Elizabeth I in Elizabeth altered her career path. So did her costarring role the next year in the aforementioned The Talented Mr. Ripley with Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Lots more Academy Awards adulation followed, including a supporting actress Oscar for her role as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator, She also scooped up nods for parts in Notes on a Scandal, Haynes’ I’m Not There, Elizabeth: The Golden Age and Blue Jasmine
Before filming Blue Jasmine, Blanchett ran the Sydney Theatre Company with her husband, Andrew Upton, for five years.
Still, it took a while for Blanchett to become reflective after wrapping her latest film.
“Only after Carol was locked, and I saw the first assembly, did I think, ‘Gosh, I’m an older woman now,’ ” she says. “For Mr. Ripley, I was newly married and in Rome, and I was just starting out.
“I didn’t really know what career I wanted, because I hadn’t seen somebody else’s career and said, ‘I’ll have that.’ I only knew what I wasn’t interested in.”
The fact is, she nearly gave up on plans for a movie career.
“When I got out of drama school, I decided I didn’t have the level of resilience to deal with rejection so I thought I would give it five years,” Blanchett says. “I never did expect to make a movie, so it’s a constant surprise that I’m working in this medium and always grateful for the opportunity.”