Carol’s Letter

The 2015 film entitled Carol has a cult following. One of its sharpest fan hooks is ‘Carol’s letter’ or simply, ‘the letter;’ it is a voice-over by Cate Blanchett that begins the film’s ending. The attached image is the letter as it appears in screenwriter Phyllis Nagy’s script. The superfluous ‘like the morning sky’ (highlighted by me) was dropped or cut at filming. Other than that, this text is what Blanchett read, verbatim.

An objective reader, and one not romanticized by the film, might immediately take issue with the inclusion of three clichés in the first paragraph: ‘there are no accidents’ and ‘everything comes full circle’ are followed by ‘Be grateful it was sooner rather than later.’ Whaat?

‘Hold your horses,’ Snidely. One, you do not hear the sultry Blanchett’s ‘Carol-voice,’ and two, allow me to set the scene. Our road-tripping protagonists, Therese Belivet, played by Rooney Mara, and Carol Aird, portrayed by Cate Blanchett, have suffered a fast-paced emotional assault. Tracked by a creepy private detective at the behest of Carol’s estranged husband, Harge, our pair’s first sexual encounter, as tender and beautiful one as ever existed, is tape-recorded. Being that it is 1952 America, Harge now has the goods to deny Carol having any contact with the couple’s daughter, Rindy, aged four. The recording was made at a motel in Waterloo, Iowa. Upon discovering the detective’s deed, Carol…