“Carolina Caroline” is a deceptively familiar lovers-on-the-lam joint. A small-town blonde hooks up with a charismatic con man, and as their romance blazes across state lines, so do their mounting criminal escapades bring them closer to tragedy. Directed by Adam Carter Rehmeier, the film wears its callbacks on its sleeve, from “Bonnie and Clyde” to “True Romance,” but it’s not aiming to reinvent the wheel. Nestled into its classic blueprint like a pair of old, reliable jeans, it banks on the quality of its ingredients — its magnetic stars and soulful sincerity — to revitalize its timeworn premise.
Caroline (Samara Weaving) catches Oliver (Kyle Gallner) pulling a minor trick at the gas station convenience store where she stocks shelves. She’s a bright-eyed country gal to his swaggering drifter, but their crooked meet-cute tells us that Caroline wants more than a simple life in Texas. A few beers and a moonlit skinny-dipping session later, the two are all in on each other, giving Caroline a good reason to finally skip town and head east in the hopes of reconnecting with her estranged mother in South Carolina.
In the first, breezier half of the film, Caroline undergoes a criminal apprenticeship under Oliver’s tutelage. Their gigs start out small — pick-pocketing and shoplifting — and build out into credit card scams and, eventually, bank heists where Caroline sticks ‘em up in a black bob and sunglasses.
Set around the end of the 1990s and teeming with the retro allure of roadside Americana, the film employs a soundscape of whining cicadas and popular folk and country-rock tracks to wash over the duo’s misdeeds with honeyed regional charm. Girlish and giggly like a shot of Southern Comfort — and with a lilting drawl to match — Caroline turns crime frisky and fun, but Weaving also gives her heroine a quiet depth and emotional intelligence that make her doubts and frustrations resonate across the film.
In teaching his craft, Oliver proves to be both a master manipulator and something of a nihilist, which makes us wonder if he’s capable of real love. Gallner arguably has the tougher task of balancing his character’s roguishness with his swooning adoration for his girl. His understated and, by the end, painfully felt emotions recall that of Ryan Gosling’s hunk in “The Notebook.”
That film is also a reminder that chemistry is perfectly capable of doing all the legwork, and here, Gallner and Weaving have it in spades. Nevertheless, this is ultimately Caroline’s show, and her place at the center of the film lets her break out of the archetype of the romantic accomplice.
Caroline eventually meets her mother (a formidable Kyra Sedgwick, in a brief but startlingly brutal turn), causing her own baggage to combust and indirectly hasten the couple’s demise. It’s a shame that the opening sequence, set a few months after the bulk of the film’s events, essentially spoils its searing finale, whose borderline corny sentimentality shouldn’t work, but somehow does thanks to Rehmeier’s tender, patient direction. Like an acoustic ballad — say, Jason Isbell’s “Cover Me Up” that receives an auspicious needle drop — “Carolina Caroline” doesn’t seem all that remarkable until you hush and take in the lyrics. Suddenly, you’re swept up in big feelings.
Carolina Caroline Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters.
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