‘Carol & Johnny’ Review: Colin Barnicle True-Crime Documentary Is Unbelievable & Sprawling [Tribeca]

“I ran it like a business,” says Johnny Williams in the early moments of Colin Barnicle‘s “Carol & Johnny.” And for Johnny and his wife Carol, it was a lucrative business, albeit a short-lived one, and totally illegal. From 1986 to their capture in July 1994, the pair pulled off the largest string of bank heists in the history of the FBI. Their spree totaled fifty-six holdups, spanning from Texas through the Southwest to San Diego to Seattle. In the process, they stole more than $750,000. For them, it was “a job,” explains Carol, involving casing banks and their schedules for weeks, months, or an entire year, with various plans and getaway routes. But the couple’s spree ended 27 years ago, and now, after decades in prison, the two are out, living separately, acclimating to a world that’s gone on without them.  

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Barnicle’s latest true crime documentary pivots around whether Johnny and Carol will reunite after twenty-seven years apart. The pair last saw each other on January 25, 1995, at a sentencing hearing. Since Johnny got out of prison early through compassionate release in January 2021, though, he and Carol have only spoken over the phone. From its set-up, one expects Barnicle has a romantic ode in store for his audience to criminal lovers on the lam, whose undying devotion to each other, after all this time, will flare up again upon reunion. But the reality, and Barnicle, have little time for such idyllic fancies. Carol suffered a stroke in prison and now cares for a dying aunt in Dallas since her release from prison in 2015. Meanwhile, Johnny lives in a halfway house in Seattle, aspiring “to create a new life from nothing” by learning about cloud sharing at a vocational school.

Of course, Johnny’s mind is constantly on Carol, and once he has a steady (and legitimate) source of income, he plans to go to Dallas and whisk her off to Arizona, Sun City, or Scottsdale, preferably. Carol, however, remains hesitant to reconnect. Her family wants her to have nothing to do with Johnny. And Johnny’s remaining family in Texas feels similarly about him. Despite this, Carol still loves Johnny. “That will make some people angry, but I can’t help what I feel,” she says. That makes sense, in a way, as the pair spent over fifteen years together. The couple first met in 1979 and quickly fell in together. Carol worked at a local department store at the time, only fifteen months out of high school. And Johnny had been released from prison eleven months earlier for an impulsive robbery by gunpoint, but his insistence not to return to jail won her over. Despite a nine-year age gap, the couple fell in love, and after they married in 1980, they dreamed of a life together beyond Dallas and Johnny’s troubled past.

The crux of “Carol & Johnny” comes in Barnicle’s steady dismantling of Johnny’s romantic mythos as both an outlaw and a loving husband. And compared to his overlong and underwhelming “This Is A Robbery: The World’s Greatest Art Heist” for Netflix last year, Barnicle shows an astute capacity to hone this doc’s thesis down to its most essential bits. “This Is A Robbery” would have done better with a runtime like “Carol & Johnny” has. At just 92 minutes, including end credits, this is a brisk film, but it’s also a no-nonsense one. Barnicle lets the material and subjects speak for themselves without chasing any possible narrative strand for a distended but vacuous runtime. The result is a minor, albeit sharply crafted, look at, as FBI Agent Dan Blaser calls it, “a [good, but sad] human-interest story” about a woman who mistakes control for love.  

Holes in Johnny’s fairy-tale romance with Carol come quick and early. A year into their marriage, Johnny fractures his skull in a car accident, and “after that,” he vaguely states, “I wasn’t able to cover rent.” So, what did Carol and Johnny do in the roughly five years between that accident and when Johnny first started robbing banks? There’s talk of drifting, but nothing concrete until Johnny begins researching bank robberies at the public library in 1985. Half a decade is a lot of time to account for, and neither of them does in the documentary. The gap speaks less to a romantic idyll than the lack of opportunities for a simple, uneducated woman on bad terms with her family who’s married to an ex-con. And it also hints at the relationship’s lack of authentic intimacy: of two people brought together by arbitrary circumstance more than through an embodied and fulfilling love for one another.

Once Barnicle shifts to Johnny’s spree of robberies, the absence of nearly a third of the couple’s relationship from their recounting reverberates for the rest of the film. Stories Johnny tells about how he honed his robbery method as he gleefully points to his heist ledger, blown up on a projector, come off like a teenager detailing his vain pursuits. He shows off his conquests and the meticulous craft he honed to achieve them, but Johnny hardly talks about how his robberies constantly put Carol in danger. Glaser, who worked on Johnny and Carol’s case from the FBI’s Seattle branch until their capture by him in 1994, shows little sympathy in his judgment of Johnny. “He was numb to sensitivity to other people’s feelings,” he explains. “She didn’t start out as a criminal,” he goes on, “she was controlled [by him],” and “I don’t think she wanted to do what she did.” And, most damning, Glaser comments, “It was all about him. She might’ve just been company and someone to drive the getaway car.”

Carol intuits as much when she references Johnny’s controlling behavior: of how she dressed; the groceries she purchased. But there are also the threats of how she’d be dropped off at her parents’ if she didn’t get a driver’s license. Or how Johnny would go after her family if she didn’t comply with being his getaway driver. Carol insists she doesn’t blame Johnny for what happened to them early in the doc. There’s also Johnny’s impulsiveness, lack of forethought beyond his heists, and the general need always to get his way. When his halfway house demands a urinalysis late in the movie, standard protocol for such places, Johnny breaks parole for a weekend in Las Vegas, knowing it will send him back to prison. He wins $11,000, but the move alienates Carol and shows Johnny still hasn’t outgrown the patterns that got them into trouble in the first place. “You’d think he’d learn from the pain he suffered along the way,” Glaser comments.

But neither Carol nor Johnny have learned anything after decades in prison. When Carol says, late in the film, that “I lived a life of crime because I didn’t want my husband to stop loving me,” she comes off as a cowed woman still unable to look beyond naive ideals of marriage and young romance to see what her partnership with Johnny really was. As for Johnny, he suffers delusions of his own in Seattle. He remains convinced that “[Carol] is waiting for me to come rescue her” down in Dallas, oblivious that she’s been in the real world again without him for over five years. And in those five years, she’s had to, in her own words, “be on my own [and] make my own decisions.”  

Another version of “Carol & Johnny” dissects the couple from another angle that highlights how upbringing, institutional programming, and other sociological factors coalesce into two people drawn to wayward crime to survive. Barnicle wisely avoids that dimension, though, and focuses instead on his two subjects in all of their pitiable simplemindedness. The saddest part of the film is when Johnny reels off a series of thoughtless and shortsighted ideas he had for the pair as alternatives to their spree, including gold prospecting, computer crime, vault heists, and investing in Starbucks stock. The lack of forethought for legitimate alternatives to a life of crime then betrays how both, even now, don’t have the presence of mind for anything else. Carol may have wised up now, realizing that there are always alternatives, but she’s in the twilight of her life. It’s too late for these two to be anything other than what they chose to be half a lifetime ago.

Old photographs of the couple at the Grand Canyon, White Sands National Park, and nude beaches in California document that Carol and Johnny’s lifestyle had its honeymoon moments. But these photos conceal the truth as much as they exhibit it. Carol and Johnny took these pictures between robberies when they had to drive to Las Vegas to wash out the stolen money before they hid away for months in the Southwest or Pacific Northwest until the next job, out of sight without friends or loved ones. No amount of vacation spots, or steak dinners with glasses of champagne, counteract the loneliness, the inanity, and the fear inherent in that life. It was rootless, reckless, and endlessly transitory. The irony is that their scheme fell apart once they bought a house as a safe haven in Los Obos, California. Once the pair stopped moving and had a chance to reflect upon their way of life, Carol half-recognized the grim reality of their situation. Their capture happened shortly afterward.

But a darker truth trickles out once Johnny confesses his worst crime in the film’s latter stages. In late 1980, just three months after they were married, he took a life insurance claim on Carol and planned to kill her in a hit-and-run accident. He didn’t have the conviction to go through with it, but then, did he ever have the conviction to do anything but look out primarily for himself? A photograph of the married couple first seen in the title credits, taken mere days before Johnny attempted to kill his wife, shows up again after Johnny tearfully reveals his plan to murder Carol. And after that confession, the audience’s perception of that photo shifts. Before, a young couple was there, simple but romantically entwined, the husband’s hand draped across the young lady’s shoulder. Now, the photo hints at latent dynamics of capture, possession, and cruelty, Johnny’s eyes a little more vacant than they looked before. And yet, despite Carol now knowing about Johnny’s intentions back then, they remain married: bound together but separated by distance and time. Maybe that gulf between them was always there. [B-]

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