On the Criterion Channel yesterday, I watched Carol & Joy, a 2025 short documentary film directed by Nathan Silver, executive produced by Natalie Portman, featuring the actress Carol Kane and her 98-year old mother Joy in their shared New York City apartment. Nathan Silver had directed Carol Kane in the 2024 film Between the Temples, and made this short film, at 38 minutes long, to focus on the interesting life of her mother, Joy.
Joy is originally from Cleveland, OH, and grew up with an abusive father who beat her when she wet the bed at three years old, and had a mother who undermined her and criticized her body. Yet, despite that upbringing, Joy was passionate about dance and music, having been brought to the symphony by her father when she was a girl, and feeling the music lift her in her body and having a spiritual experience.
Yet when she was a young woman, her family forced her to marry a young man, Michael Kane, putting in an engagement announcement in the newspaper without her knowledge or consent, and her father threatened to put her in a sanitarium if she tried to escape to New York City to be a dancer. So she married Michael, who became Carol's father, and felt stifled and unhappy in the marriage, hinting that she later cheated on him as a way to get him to divorce her, but that he still wanted to stay married. They finally divorced in 1964, when Carol was 12, and she was made to be examined by doctors through a psychological exam afterwards, a sign of the times of distrusting women's feelings and wanting them to stick to the status quo. She moved to Paris, where she could make her life with her own artistic visions, became a music teacher, and has been living in New York City in her Manhattan apartment for the last 25 years, with Carol's apartment right above hers, and they have lived together since the pandemic in 2020.
I really enjoyed this film a lot. Joy was fascinating and thoughtful and spoke deeply about her life, and Carol, despite being famous, largely takes a backseat to listen to her mother's stories, spending the first few minutes of the documentary making coffee for her mother and looking for the half and half creamer.
The filmmaking crew had a habit of running out of film, saying "roll out" to mean the film had ran out, so the picture would go but the audio would be running, and often interrupting Joy's stories, and afterwards I felt it was rude to keep doing that to her, as they are a professional film crew and should know better, as well as to respect the time of a woman who is nearly 100 years old telling them her life story.
I could see how Carol Kane, with her charming eccentricities and her commitment to being independent (she has never married or had any kids) could be influenced by her mother's strive for autonomy and being an artist on her own terms. I really enjoyed this lovely slice of life documentary a lot.
