A small-town Texas girl with only a dead-end job and an aging father quickly falls for a charming drifter and climbs into his car to begin an unusual life. The premise of Caroline Caroline could have been ripped from countless American road movies, from iconic films like Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands to far paler imitations, and the plot developments that follow aren't particularly novel. But Adam Carter Rehmeyer's thriller, like many good B-movies, is greater than the sum of its parts, and the star-studded cast and chemistry are the primary, unquantifiable factors that elevate the film. Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner, two fine actors who rarely get the shine that comes with a truly star-studded project, bask in the glow of their performances; Together they bring life to a potentially standard film.
This in no way detracts from Rehmeier's direction or William Thomas Dean IV's crisp, succinct screenplay: both work within strong genre conventions but infuse enough depth and humanity to keep the film from feeling formulaic. Released by Magnolia Pictures after its Toronto premiere last year, Caroline Caroline deserves to find a devoted following. And Rehmeier knows what to expect, as his second feature, 2020's Dinner in America, achieved cult status thanks to TikTok (and a belated theatrical release) a full four years after its quiet Sundance debut. He certainly has bigger projects on the horizon.
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While Weaving and Gallner are far from unknown—both are recognizable to a wider audience for their work in horror franchises—Caroline Caroline feels like something of a comeback. Each plays a classic American type (the irrepressible good girl and the soulful bad boy, respectively), bringing something disarming and previously unseen to their on-screen charm; together, their rapport is so immediate and electric that it sets the tone for the entire film. After a somewhat unnecessary flashback prologue, the premise is swift and compelling: Caroline (Weaving), a bored gas station cleaner, spots handsome con man Oliver (Gallner) performing an elaborate banknote-swapping scam on an elderly cashier and is instantly intrigued. And so are we.
She confronts him not to right a wrong but to get his attention; he soon begins teaching her his tricks, and she quickly masters them. Though she is close to her father (Jon Gries), who raised her after her mother fled the city years ago, she has grown tired of Texas, and Oliver satisfies both her wanderlust and her constant passion. The actors are so sparkling and sexy together that we, like Caroline, may initially perceive their petty criminal exploits—money scams, shoplifting, light pickpocketing—as mere play, a prelude to their lovemaking on a bed strewn with scattered dollar bills. However, when it comes to the bank robbery, the tone shifts, and Weaving's insightful performance shows how guilt gradually intrudes into Caroline's bubbling ecstasy.
Meanwhile, Gallner keeps Oliver enigmatic enough to maintain the tense atmosphere. His charm, with drawls and winks, is front and center, and his attraction to the heroine seems genuine and even rather protective, but his penchant for violence is so indifferent as to be alarming. For a man who has the answer to everything, he's momentarily confused when Caroline earnestly asks, "How do you know if we're good people pretending to be bad, or bad people pretending to be good?" (We can't be sure, either.) Nevertheless, they continue on to South Carolina, a destination Caroline has chosen in the vague hope of reuniting with her long-lost mother. One caustic cameo from Kyra Sedgwick cruelly shatters this sentimental fantasy: the end of Caroline's audacious American dream begins.
Carolina Carolina has a fluid atmosphere that borrows freely from both past and present: Rehmeier fills the soundtrack with retro-inspired contemporary country music from artists like Jason Isbell and Chris Stapleton, while the straightforward, tense genre-defining narrative style harks back to the New Hollywood cinema of the 1970s. But the action unfolds in the misty midsummer of the '90s—tangibly evoked by Jean-Philippe Bernier's rich, sun-drenched images—marked largely by the absence of cell phones and the greater simplicity of consequences. It's enough to evoke nostalgia for an era when credit card fraud was committed with more personal abandon, and when it was easier for someone prone to it to simply disappear in America.
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