On Golden Exits
I first saw Golden Exits earlier this year, and seeing it again today I was ushered back to that already long-ago moment in my life when so many visions I’d kept of the future were madly vanishing from sight like rats at the flicker of a lamp.
I was living in Brooklyn, unemployed and aimless, regularly taking thirty-minute train rides into Manhattan to see movies. It was February — maybe New York’s most unforgiving month. I remember trudging through Chinatown slush and snow to the Metrograph, a SZA song on my brain:
...You love the way I pop my top
Or love how I lose my cool
Or love how I look at you,
Say, why?
It ain’t no fighting,
No, I can’t stop it
This took a while...
In my apartment, later, after making the cold and friendless journey back, I played this music aloud and danced on my bed sheets under the glow of string lights. I’d venture out to the deli on the corner and buy a pint of Ben and Jerry’s. Then I’d return to my little room and eat the ice cream while watching celebrity interviews on my laptop. I would fall asleep early in the morning, long after whatever movie I’d gone to see the previous day had slipped into my growing back catalog of harmless distractions.
Through all this I was unhappy, despairing and completely lost. Golden Exits spoke to my melancholy even before I knew that I was stuck in it. Watching now, I can taste those saturated, empty hours in the very pitch of Emily Browning’s voice, or in the droll, earnest soliloquies of Lily Rabe.
Writer-director Alex Ross Perry writes people with elegant patience. His movies are quiet seclusions in New York City apartments and work spaces, where characters elucidate their feelings to one another while remaining bound within strained interpersonal dynamics. In this film, sisters Alyssa (Chloë Sevigny) and Gwendolyn (Mary-Louise Parker) talk, addressing their respective disillusionments, while never quite conceding true honesty. They remain hesitant, resentful of one another due to longstanding competitiveness. So the conversation is cut a bit short. Not everything that could be said is.
Golden Exits is a movie about the tactful retreats we make in life when we sense that things are getting a bit out of hand — when we find ourselves stumbling down a destructive path, pull back, and catch the hurt before it can us. We make mistakes in life; that is a wisdom each of the characters in this film possesses, in spite of their personal failings. And it is this perspective that redeems their failures, or at least preserves a kind of ceasefire, a polite remission full of silence and pain, with everyone still waiting for balm to soothe seemingly unhealable wounds.
Three more months of ungainly weather and morose cinephilia passed before I made my own retreat back upstate to live with my parents. That time in the city is a personal blip that frightens me still, a kind of stupor that delivered me to a strange new dimension of alienation and embarrassment. This movie stands as a relieving testimonial to that state of mind, a place to which I’d prefer not to return.
People try to make good choices. But the realities of emotion, desire and insecurity that we all face are seldom acknowledged by ourselves or others. It is illuminating and, in a way, encouraging to see those realities play across a screen for ninety-three minutes. For me, Golden Exits is a time capsule to a period in my life when I was faced with — and was behooved to acknowledge — an urgent lesson in self-care.
