‘Carolina Caroline’ Review: Reheated ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ Nachos
Despite solid performances from Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner, alongside an assured sense of style, Adam Carter Rehmeier’s Carolina Caroline doesn’t have much to offer beyond its obvious inspirations.
Never has the sentence “We have Bonnie and Clyde at home” felt more apparent than in Adam Carter Rehmeier’s Carolina Caroline, a movie that seems primarily inspired by Arthur Penn’s 1967 New Hollywood drama that forever changed the landscape of filmmaking. In comparison, Rehmeier’s thriller will be quickly forgotten, even if one can’t overstate its behind-the-camera confidence and thrilling performances from its lead stars, Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner.
Rehmeier and screenwriter William Thomas Dean IV don’t hide their obvious inspirations and wear them on their sleeves, which is commendable until it isn’t. By tracking the relationship between Caroline (Samara Weaving) and petty thief Oliver (Kyle Gallner), who teaches her the ropes and uses her as a pawn in a string of bank robberies, while he awaits in the getaway car, there’s a golden opportunity to reframe this archetypal “doomed” relationship on screen. After all, such a pairing has been done time and again before it has, in recent memory, become redundant and devoid of creativity.
This could’ve been avoided if Rehmeier had something to say about the relationship on screen, but the overall picture of Carolina Caroline amounts to very little, barring some aesthetic pastiche of the great American films of the 1970s. Jean-Philippe Bernier’s cinematography certainly looks alluring and definitely adds some texture to the proceedings. However, it’s in service of a story that doesn’t really know which direction it should take, especially when tracking the development of the doe-eyed Caroline into a quasi-femme fatale.
In any event, Weaving’s performance is so good one momentarily forgets the film’s lack of identity away from the inspirations Rehmeier riffs off from. She imbues Caroline’s transformation with tangible immediacy that we immediately latch onto her spiral into criminality, even when the screenplay consistently repeats things we’ve seen two scenes ago. One can almost map out where this entire thing will be going, even during a succession of montages that show Caroline and Oliver rob a bevy of banks across America.
There’s a reason why Oliver wants to stick it to the man and live his life on the edge, but the screenplay barely explores any of the thematic threads it begins to introduce and hinges your enjoyment of the film solely on Weaving and Gallner’s chemistry. It certainly works, primarily because Gallner has always had an old-school charm in any of the performances he gives, whether in pure genre offerings or in mainstream titles. He applies those skills so well to his portrayal of Oliver, a rebel who has always had a knack to life on his own terms without anyone telling him what he’s doing may have severe consequences.
He, by far, has the most interesting trajectory, especially as the movie takes a darker turn following Caroline's visit to his birth mother, Deborah (Kyra Sedgwick), who abandoned her when she was a baby. Attempting to search for answers, Deborah gives her daughter no satisfaction and essentially rejects everything Caroline wanted to see when the opportunity to visit her hometown arose. It predates the couple’s downfall, but most importantly, it has a lasting impact on how we perceive the character and her relationship to Oliver.
Sedgwick is only in the movie for one extended sequence, but it’s likely the performance most will remember coming out of the film, because it actively changes our perception of Caroline and Oliver’s relationship, while the rest of the movie stays moot on anything it introduces. It can be fun on occasion, and a midpoint chase scene certainly proves that Rehmeier has the chops to direct a large-scale action movie someday, but the overall result disappoints more than it enthralls – or enlightens us – about this twisted relationship that will eventually reach an inevitable (tragic) conclusion.
Once we arrive at that moment, it sadly doesn’t land with the same jaw-dropping horrors of Bonnie and Clyde. Rehmeier is smart to reframe it, but not in a way that leaves us feeling the impact long after we’ve left the cinema. It’s a movie that exists that will certainly have its fans, but won’t be as fondly remembered as the text it’s trying to emulate. Thank god for Samara and Kyle, whose presence elevates the material and makes this film watchable; without them, who knows if Carolina Caroline would get any attention whatsoever.