Joel on Film

The young woman is easily influenced, having developed a certain sensitivity on account of an absent mother and an overprotective father, but does possess a strong will that occasionally disarms. The young man easily influences, after a life spent hustling at the expense of the wealthy and the privileged, but does showcase a moral compass about as complex as they come. Together, they form the pair of protagonists in director Adam Carter Rehmeier’s Carolina Caroline, although as the title might suggest, it’s named after only one of these two.

Caroline (Samara Weaving), then, is our protagonist and heroine, whom we meet in a brief flash-forward to sometime much, much later than the lion’s share of this story. She longs to visit the southern of the two Carolinas, for her mother left to live in the state—or so rumor has it—before Caroline even turned one year old. Her father (played by Jon Gries) doesn’t have much to say about the subject, except that he’s now become one of those fathers who tells stories and recounts memories, which is all he feels he’s good for now.

Caroline wants some excitement and someone with whom to share it, and of course, the other main character comes along to provide both, in an extreme sense of the term. He’s Oliver (Kyle Gallner, who ably transitioned from playing youthful dodgers to character-actor types—with this one being sort of both), and she notices right off the bat that this guy is probably the exact bad news she needs. He’s a con man, performing a slick piece of quick-change artistry at the counter of her filling station and immediately, irrevocably making himself attractive to her.

The solid thing about this relationship, as developed by Tom Dean’s screenplay, is that we fully believe it to be both one based upon genuine and mutual respect and also, more than likely, a little bit of a game on the part of Oliver. He’s a man, as played by a particularly strong Gallner, who knows exactly what he wants, what he thinks and how he’s come to those philosophies. We even understand him a little bit once he explains that no one from whom he steals, typically of the filthy-rich variety, will miss what’s gone, while to someone among his economic class, that money means everything.

Does that, as Caroline asks at one point, make them bad people trying to be good or good people pretending to be bad? The line is not so clearly demarcated in these ethical scenarios. The ethics of the thing are probably quite a bit more complicated than the legality, but though he does not clearly answer, we can guess Oliver’s opinion on the matter with some certainty.

Much of the film is devoted to their con-artistry exploits, which escalate from hapless individuals to a string of banks and credit unions across the southern United States, but though they arrive in the form of montages, the point is not the thrill of genre they provide. Indeed, the montage is more or less halted in its tracks–first when Oliver needs to use the butt of a gun to knock a police officer out and then, well, you can probably guess how the gun is used the second time. They become outlaws of the Bonnie-and-Clyde variety, gaining notoriety and spurring a manhunt.

In between, we get to see this dynamic develop and complicate, through the rock-solid performances from these two actors (Weaving commits to the theatrical dialect of the region, while deepening the image of a sort-of-ditz learning as she goes). A few other sources of drama raise their heads, too, such as a detour that takes the pair to South Carolina to meet Caroline’s long-lost mother. When that happens, the woman is played by Kyra Sedgwick in a boisterous but chilling performance that confirms a lot of our suspicions and offers a good reminder about meeting our heroes.

Carolina Caroline, then, is a solid on-the-lam thriller that, because these two people are so richly drawn, is a perceptive character study, to boot. As for how the story resolves itself, Dean and Rehmeier are smart enough to deviate from the Bonnie and Clyde connection entirely for something quite different and even subversive.

Rating: *** (out ****)