At first glance, Adam Carter Rehmeier’s Carolina Caroline is the sort of film online cinephiles love to bemoan “they don’t make anymore,” a grounded crime thriller for adults, free of the confines of IP branding, that stars beautiful people and a healthy but not gratuitous amount of sex. If the promise of solid, muscular entertainment is often enough to make a movie worthwhile, the pitfalls of consciously making films in familiar molds are self-evident: they don’t make ‘em like this anymore because they already did, many times over. Rehmeier and writer William Thomas Dean IV have colored in the lines to make their own Bonnie and Clyde (or Badlands or Gun Crazy or any number of similar films), but they haven’t quite updated the model for the present, belaboring the film’s throwback nature by setting it in the 20th century. This is cinema that lives purely in the past and aims for nothing greater than comforting entertainment. And so, it lives and dies on the strength of its cast, its filmmaking, and whatever minor variations it might offer on the theme.
Smooth criminal Oliver (Kyle Gallner) pulls a quick change scam at a Texas gas station, hoodwinking the proprietor but catching the attention of Caroline (Samara Weaving), who is stocking the shelves mere feet away. Intrigued by the con man’s confidence and disarmed by his roguish good looks, she follows him to the local watering hole and they begin a whirlwind romance. Soon, he has whisked her away from home — she wants to see South Carolina, the home of her absent mother — and initiates her into a life of crime. Caroline learns the quick change scam and pickpocketing, before the couple eventually graduate to bank robbery.
In bed, Caroline tells Oliver that their crime spree is the best she’s ever felt, and it’s clear that, in their relationship, sexual pleasure and criminality are tightly entwined. Indeed, a montage of their initial string of armed robberies is intercut with scenes of sex. Caroline is intoxicated by this lifestyle, and her wide-eyed gaze toward Oliver remains even as his behavior becomes increasingly unhinged. While the Carolina Caroline initially views their romance with a hint of suspicion, it becomes clear over time that Caroline’s passion is reciprocated in full, however unbelievable that sometimes feels. But the apparently sincere love story that buoys Carolina Caroline doesn’t work, as it’s between two thin archetypes rather than actual characters with depth, and the chemistry between Gallner and Weaving, while often magicked into existence by the camera focusing on lustful looks, isn’t enough to convince.
Saddled with a Southern accent, Weaving comes across as phony and stiff, undercutting the carefree looseness a character who so easily falls into this crime spree otherwise projects. In other roles, like this year’s Over Your Dead Body, the Australian actress’ posh uprightness is a boon, but here it’s a distraction, a constant reminder that you are watching a would-be movie star playacting Texan charm. She is, however, a talented enough performer that her eyes and mouth are usually able to convey a depth of emotion that her dialogue can’t always access.
It doesn’t help matters that Caroline isn’t much of a person. If Oliver is also thinly characterized, the film at least views him at a distance, his psychology suspensefully obscured. Being the attractive, sweaty con man Caroline is magnetically drawn to is enough. But Caroline is too much of a blank slate to compel as a central character. Without much obvious material need — she’s definitely not rich, but there’s no real sign of destitution either — her behavior is defined entirely by her restlessness, uncertainty about her mother, and, most frustratingly, her ill-advised attraction to this dangerous man. She is a character who has been molded out of clay just for this movie, plucked out of the ether and plunked into the gas station where she works in the first scene. If this character had the past of an adult woman, then maybe seeing a police officer asking after her wigged alter ego following a string of robberies wouldn’t appear to be the first time she has ever considered consequences for her actions. A flashback to scared children in one of her heists likewise comes across as the first time she has ever experienced moral compunction. That she is so unbelievably naïve sinks a film that is ostensibly invested in her character over all else, the rest of it registering as about as cliché as it gets. All Carolina Caroline has to offer is the feeling that, yes, we used to make movies like this in this country. But we used to make ’em better, too.
DIRECTOR: Adam Carter Rehmeier; CAST: Samara Weaving, Kyle Gallner, Kyra Sedgwick, Jon Gries; DISTRIBUTOR: Magnolia Pictures; IN THEATERS: June 5; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 45 min.
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