Carolina Caroline: Outlaw Lovers on the Lam (Again) Apparently Never Gets Old

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B+

If the concept of ne’er-do-well lovers on the run across rural United States can be considered a genre — and surely by now, it can — then Carolina Caroline joins a notable roster that includes Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, and Natural Born Killers, perhaps scored by Steve Miller’s “Take the Money and Run” for good measure.

That’s not in any way to dismiss the film, which had its world premiere last fall at TIFF and is enormously watchable and mercifully compact, with great atmospherics, some striking shots, and its own honky-tonk soundtrack worthy of its southern setting.

Leads Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner have real chemistry as fetching outlaws Caroline and Oliver, abetted in one scene by the redoubtable Kyra Sedgwick as Caroline’s brittle, hard-drinking mama who gives Caroline pause in her quest to beat tedium through crime. Engaging for sure, but you have seen an iteration of this story before.

It goes something like this. Caroline leads a stupefying existence in smalltown Texas, mopping floors and stocking shelves at the local gas station. One ordinary, tedious day, a striking stranger, Oliver, enters Caroline’s workplace. She observes him successfully completing a small con on the cashier and follows him outside to his car. From the get-go, sparks fly.

When the pair cross paths later that night at a local watering hole, Oliver ignites Caroline’s imagination simply by asking about her dreams, which include a visit to South Carolina to see her mama. Caroline asks Oliver what the hell he is doing in a backwater like her hometown. Before you can say “gimme another PBR,” smoking-hot sex and wayfaring scams are afoot.

Oliver rationalizes their thefts — relieving first individuals and small businesses and then banks of their assets — as a kind of celestial evening of the score. Caroline sees their scams as her ticket out of a dreary existence towards something more exciting.

“Teach me how to con,” Caroline purrs in one scene reminiscent of yet another filmic (if forgettable) scam story, Harry in Your Pocket; the pair practice pickpocketing.

Things work thrillingly well until, of course, they don’t though the story makes room for themes of agency and independence even if one is left questioning why Caroline bought into this unambiguously unlawful lifestyle so quickly, and how Oliver got there in the first place.

In the end, writer-director Adam Carter Rehmeier’s Carolina Caroline — the odd title a play on the protagonist’s name and the state that magnetically draws her toward it — succeeds in blending the buoyancy of a road movie with the urgency of a crime caper, propelled by a pair of attractive bandits having a blast, at least initially.

The surprises may be few, but the takeaway is satisfying, nonetheless.

Carolina Caroline. Directed by Adam Carter Rehmeier. Starring Samara Weaving, Kyle Gallner, and Kyra Sedgwick. In theatres June 5.