Carolina Caroline (Adam Rehmeir, 2026)
In a nation that’s spent it’s 250 year existence telling itself it has a single standard of justice, in spite of the mountain of very clear evidence to the contrary, it’s not surprising a long history of romanticizing outlaws would also exist. Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and Pretty Boy Floyd became folk heroes, because people needed folk heroes in the face of the duplicity of law and corruption. Most of us don’t love outlaws because they’re violent criminals. We love outlaws because we know there’s something lacking in how the definitions of the words violent and criminal work in our collective consciousness, our politics and as a result, our lives. Whether the violence is considered criminal or not too often depends more on who’s committing it, and as often, who’s profiting from it, as anything else.
It’s no more surprising that the same nation would find need to invent terms like snake oil salesman and confidence man. If the concept of a “national character” weren’t itself so dubious, the symbols we use to try to represent it would all fail in accurately depicting it, in comparison to the con artist. We have, after all, been trying to convince ourselves and each other all these years there is only one standard of law, that it applies equally to all, despite how clearly false that is. Maybe every nation cons itself to some degree, but there may not be another nation right now simultaneously conning itself so successfully, while being presented with so much evidence of the existence of that con.
In some part, our fascination with con artists is derived from what's in the term itself. They are people who demonstrate sheer, unadulterated confidence, and in these here “United” States, we love few things more than confidence. Whether or not it’s earned is clearly less important than embodying it, and the con artist embodies it, despite every indication by "polite" society that they shouldn't be able to.
Con artists are also nearly perfect vehicles as characters in fiction. They deal in fictions of their own creation, they give excuses to write characters who are nearly supernaturally charming, and a well written con is an excellent reason for audiences to experience things like suspense, betrayal, intrigue, and the duplicity we all fear in each other where love is concerned. Often, those stories even give us a little taste of what it would be like to take matters into our own hands and wrench something like justice from a world that guards it with extreme prejudice. Stories about con artists help assuage the cognitive dissonance of following the rules in a society where the rules can change from minute to minute, depending on who's in the room, what block you're standing on or the zip code you were born in. They give people the opportunity to play out that not completely irrational desire to say, "If the rules aren't fair, why not exploit that to my advantage?"
Carolina Caroline is the latest in this long history of outlaw and con artist stories to hit the big screen. It is both firmly in the tradition of the "outlaw lovers on the road" films and its own, intimate, unique take. The premise is simple enough. Caroline (Samara Weaving) catches Oliver (Kyle Gallner) running a quick change scam on the person behind the register at the gas station she works in. When she confronts him about it, a spark is lit, and the rest of the film is us, the audience, watching the fire that erupts from it.
Writer Tom Dean, director Adam Rehmeir, and both leads understand why this genre is such satisfying fiction. They know what we come to the movies to see when we buy a ticket for a film featuring criminal lovers, conning, scamming and robbing their way across the landscape of the United States. They also understand, the audience for those stories is likely to have seen dozens, if not hundreds of different versions of that story. Instead of reaching for further, more and more fantastical cons, scams and robberies that require an almost supernatural level of forethought, planning and understanding of human behavior, they drill down to the intimate nature of the bond between the characters, and the film is all the better for it. It may not be possible to out Ocean Danny Ocean and the crew of the Soderbergh directed, Clooney and Pitt starring franchise. As breezy, fun adventure films focused on con artists go, they're about as good as can be found. Carolina Caroline has a completely different intent.
Instead of chasing that dragon, Carolina Caroline drills down into the duality of American life, the twin urges to try and be the "best" people we can, and the urge to stop trying to follow rules enforced by systems that define our lives, but those systems are uninterested in following themselves.
Caroline Daniels is the character whose perspective is our window on this journey, played by Samara Weaving. Weaving has built a solid career in horror and left of center independent films. If quality of performances was the only measure, she'd be among the best known and most liked actors in her generation, and Carolina Caroline is further proof of why. Kyle Gallner plays Oliver, the inflection point for Caroline's journey into this criminal lifestyle. He's walked a similar road, starting off as a child actor, and quietly building a career of excellent supporting performances, and a few leads in smaller, off kilter indie films. They're both severely undervalued actors, and this is the best work either have done in their respective careers. It's also the best on screen chemistry I've seen in a film in a long time. If you've been longing for some heat and steam in your theaters, Carolina Caroline has the goods.
As much as the con artist and outlaw narratives have been part of the mainstream of American cinema since its inception, Carolina Caroline is probably too subtle for the expectations of the general moviegoing audience. That subtlety, and the close intimacy of the script's perspective is what gives Weaving and Gallner the chance to shine though. With one exception, the signposts along the journey aren't clearly marked and spotlit. Like Caroline and Oliver's travels, on the surface, the first half of film seems to be wandering, without a destination in mind. The arrival at its destination though, changes the context of what it took to get there. The conclusion reveals it's been a character study, and reveals the questions the film has been interested in all along. It doesn't necessarily tell the audience which are the right answers, so much as leave it up to us to decide for ourselves.
It's also a visually beautiful film. From the shots of a bucolic, rural American South, to the scenes of Weaving and Gallner simply exchanging dialog in bars, hotels, diners and cars, it's gorgeous. Any living human being should jump at the opportunity, should the chance arise, to have cinematographer Jean-Philippe Bernier photograph them. The colors are rich, sumptuous, vivid and warm, and night scenes are both naturalistic, with deep blacks, warm highlights, and a slight sheen of glamour. Combined with the realism of the set design, it prevents the visual language from tipping into fantasy. It visually represents the duality at the film's center. There is the lure and attraction of newly emerging love in the classic glamor of the photography, against the rough, unpolished reality of the set design. In a way, this is one of the central ideas of the film. The sheen of new love is no less real than the uglier material world it exists in, and how we assemble those facts defines our reality, which ultimately defines who we are.
John Gries and Kyra Sedgewick are the only real supporting characters in the film, and though neither of them have a significant amount of screen time, they are both characteristically excellent and leave their presence felt when they're not on screen.
Carolina Caroline is a fascinating character study, with two excellent lead performances at its center. It marries the older tradition of our love of outlaws and con artists with the variety of sensitive, intuitive and incisive filmmaking that gave the nineties mumblecore movement credibility. It's a captivating picture of a young woman deciding who she wants to be in the face of the world she's presented with having to live in, and which world, among the many that exist in it, she would rather be part of.
Unfortunately, this is not likely to set the box office on fire, nor is it likely to draw the kind of awards buzz that helps push small films like this into the mainstream. It is, however, a very well made film, and worth the time for movie fans who appreciate the mediums ability to be nuanced, complex and curious about how this shit show we call a nation effects the human beings we are.