Faster than you can say Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands, Carloina Caroline jumps on the bandwagon (well, a thinly populated bandwagon) of cinema about lovers on the run and in the heat of a criminal rampage. What gives this latter-day contribution to the genre special recommendation rights are its details and unexpected emotional deposits along a raucous path.
We know to expect a proudly retro crime yarn from the film’s outset. Under the opening credits, presented in a blocky cool vintage font, we are introduced to our anti-hero protagonist Caroline (Samara Weaving, brilliant in a complicated, layered role) as she stumbles out of a funky motel in her black wig and shades, barfing in the parking lot and stealing a car at gunpoint. Loretta Lynn’s “Honky Tonk Girl” swells up in the soundtrack, as if on cue.
Ok, we think, we’re in for that kind of a movie outing, with some Tarantino spices in the recipe. But no: Director Adam Carter Rehmeier and writer William Thomas Dean Jr., abetted by the strength of their actors, have succeeded in burrowing into the “lovers on a fatalist crime spree” formula and invested empathetic warmth and backstory in the tale and its characters. We love-hate these characters, rooting for them against our own best moral code wishes.
A flashback brings back to the beginning of the story, in which Caroline, the small-town Texas girl restlessly seeking escape, meets the charismatic bad boy drifter Oliver (Kyle Gallner, creepily charismatic). As in both Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands — stories based on true life — the morally suspect male, a charming rogue, wins over a pretty, small town girl, and off they go on a crime spree. Innocent grifter games give way to a series of bank jobs across many state lines.
In one remarkable moment in the film, we are disarmed by the tonal shift from the gritty crime genre into the underlying tale of a vulnerable, abandoned child with a bruised heart. It all transpires in a scene in a seedy bar — in South Carolina, hence the title — where Caroline meets her drunken callous mother (painfully well-played by Kyra Sedgwick), shucking illusions of family bonding. Suddenly, we're not in crime-flick-land anymore, or not just that.
The texture and narrative complexity of the film also shifts gears from that point on, as the dragnet closes in and their free-spirited outlaw giddiness grows ever darker. The lengths to which Oliver’s thuggish-ness overrides his rationalizing Robin Hood–like stance early on is unhinging, just as his teary recognition of a harsh impending comeuppance — mixed with his deep love for his partner in crime and fate — makes for late-breaking poignancy amid the grit.
Director Rehmeier, whose filmography so far includes coming-of-age numbers Snack Shack and Dinner in America, and the cultish art-porn film The Bunny Game (2012), has produced something to be especially proud of this time out. Emblematically, sex appears in sensual and true-love-driven style rather than lurid or exploitative ways, coated with the romantic veneer of Jason Isbell songs strategically placed in the soundtrack. (Kudos, incidentally, go to music supervisor Lauren Fay Levy, through her smart and twanging jukebox stocked with the mythic likes of Loretta, Lucinda Williams, Townes Van Zandt, and Emmylou Harris.)
The deft ambivalent balancing act inherent in the film, on many levels, continues right through to the final shot, with Weaving skillfully fluctuating between about-to-crack vulnerability and smooth operating grifter chops. Cut to Freddy Fender, crooning the timely “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” over the end credits.
All things told, Carolina Caroline is a film which, to my sensibilities, sneaks up on you and ultimately vies for candidacy in this year’s best-of list. It seems to somehow touch on both latter-day drive-in fare and arthouse-adjacent values. Crime, presumably, still doesn’t pay, except in the White House and wherever potent crime films dwell.
Carolina Caroline is currently playing at SBIFF’s Film Center. For more details, see sbifftheatres.com . View trailer here .