‘Carousel’ Review: Chris Pine and Jenny Slate in a Painfully Languid Neorealist Drama of Lonely-Hearts Romance

Who says they don’t make ’em like they used to? “Carousel,” starring Chris Pine and Jenny Slate in a painfully languid neorealist drama of lonely-hearts romance (it’s about love, but more than that it’s all about the agony), is the sort of Sundance movie you might have encountered in the late ’90s — and by that, I’m not suggesting that it would have been a Sundance hit, subject to late-night bidding wars. I mean that it would have been a “sensitive” Sundance bubble movie that got a bit of buzz and then proceeded to go nowhere in the real world. And that would have been 30 years ago!

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In the present day, “Carousel,” with its oblique-chic drama and heavy mood shadow of Cassavetes and Bergman stylings, is a movie without a marketplace. It would get lost in the theatrical world; it will get lost on streaming. The reality is that there is no longer a viable audience for a movie like this one that ambles from scene to scene, that feels like it’s been built out of “actors’ moments” that got woven together in the editing room, that’s bathed in a warm bath of art shadow that makes everything look brown, and that’s overlaid with the kind of lugubrious string-section score that, if this is even possible, renders the characters more morose than they already are.

And yet…the lead actors are very good in it. Did I believe that Chris Pine, with his waxed and coiffed Beverly Hills look, is a sad-sack divorced physician who wears a stethoscope around his neck as he runs his quaint office as a general practitioner in Cleveland, Ohio? Not exactly. But as Noah, Pine gives a performance that’s rippled with anger and vulnerability, and he’s such a good actor that you tap into what he’s doing. Jenny Slate, wearing a choppy bob that makes her look like she just came from the Amanda Plummer Spa, plays Rebecca, who is some sort of high-powered Washington, D.C., politico who has returned to Cleveland (after the politician she was attached to leaves office) and is now teaching high school. Noah’s daughter is one of the students she’s coaching on the debate team, and she and Noah become involved.

As it turns out, though, the two grew up together and were already a couple in high school. She left to pursue her career, he got married and had a daughter, and the rest is wistful tormented history. The two pick up where they left off, only now the torment rules. Because does Noah have the faith to believe?

The writer-director, Rachel Lambert (“Sometimes I Think About Dying”), stages moments that look and feel like everyday life, and that requires talent, the kind that Rebecca Miller exhibited when she made “Personal Velocity” (which premiered at Sundance in 2002). But if you’re going to work on that high wire of quotidian experience, you also need to give the audience something to hold onto. “Carousel” feels “authentic,” but it’s also rudderless. And the storytelling, what little there is of it, has an elliptical quality that sometimes leaves you going, “Wait, can you explain that a little more?”

For a while, the drama centers on how Noah’s teenage daughter, Maya (Abby Ryder Fortson), is holding onto a hidden rage at her dad due to her parents’ divorce. She lashes out, at one point cutting her finger in a door (one of those accidents-that’s-really-not), and Rebecca, having taken the girl under her wing, warns Noah that it’s only going to get worse. Then Rebecca comes up with a plan to send Maya to a six-week program at Stanford, and as soon as the girl arrives there…she’s fine.

Noah, meanwhile, dropped Maya off at the airport, and in the movie’s strangest sequence he then goes on a cinnamon-roll-and-alcohol bender right there in the terminal, waking up in the Nashville airport. I appreciated the audacity of this sequence, but not so much the way that it wears its audacity on its sleeve. That said, at one point Noah and Rebecca have an extended argument in the kitchen, and it’s a beautifully acted scene, staged with a stinging awareness of how a divorced father like Noah can assert his authority in a way that’s at once justified and utterly desperate. Pine plays this with exquisite understanding, and Slate, in a role shorn of comedy, makes you feel the squirmy misery of being caught in a domestic dispute where there’s no winning position. 

I should add that the film is also about the primal ambivalence one can have toward renovating and selling the family home. In short, “Carousel” is a flawed drama that can be disjointed, but by the end the movie feels worth it: mannered at times, touchingly real at others. Pine and Slate achieve a beguiling tenderness together. What does the title mean? Whatever it means, it’s too abstract. And since the movie is premiering at Sundance, it’s probably destined to be praised in a way that overshadows its quality of hermetic gloom. Only now, the question that does need to be looked at squarely is: Who, exactly, is going to see this?