Golden Exits is a 2018 drama about two families in Brooklyn and the unraveling of unspoken unhappiness that occurs when a young foreign girl spending time abroad upsets the balance on both sides.
Upsetting the balance remains the cutting edge in Alex Ross Perry‘s curiously invicerating Golden Exits, a deeply shattering and beguiling film that invests a lot into its troubling characters and the limiting world they exist within. Like the fragile social boundaries of Martin Scorsese‘s brilliant The Age of Innocence, Golden Exits props up the people in its story as figures cast in crystal, tiny unseen fractures spreading under the pressures of a world being crushed under its own weight.
Set in Brooklyn, the story orbits around twenty-five year old Australian Naomi (Emily Browning), who has come to New York to assist archivist Nick (Adam Horowitz), a mid-forties man married to Alyssa (Chloë Sevigny), a psychologist, who is still reeling from her husband’s habit of hiring such girls and a past indiscretion. This is compounded by her sister Gwendolyn (Mary-Louise Parker), who mistrusts him as well. Meanwhile, there is Buddy (Jason Schwartzman), a former family friend of Naomi as children, who now, finds himself taken be her as well, stealing out in the night away from his new wife Jess (Analeigh Tipton). While these two men are hopelessly attracted, they strive for fidelity, but Naomi’s mere presence alone is enough to tip the already delicate balance, allowing much that wasn’t known before to boil to the surface.
Misdirection makes Golden Exits most effective as Nick and Buddy struggle with their feelings and relationships. Naomi is not a temptress or even a girl with intent, but a young, attractive woman, who simply has her own aspirations – she mentions her dream is to write nonfiction about ordinary people – who ends up being catalyst for much upheaval in the lives of those around her. It is conversationally-driven, with quiet moments where these people cross about the neighborhood, the women sharing their thoughts on the two men and the men shaped by forces that seem well out of their control. Gwendolyn is a toxic, angry woman venomously railing against the inherent weakness in men, clearly jealous of not just Naomi’s age and beauty but her potential. Alyssa is greatly influenced by her.
Perry, who wrote the screenplay, doesn’t position Naomi as you might expect, she a traveler in this mess who goes from one encounter where she is told by one character another is vile, only to be seen in the next getting the opposite description. It’s a beehive of entanglements that leave her on a precarious ledge. This isn’t a lurid tale of affair or a film of secrets and dangerous liaisons, but rather a complicated story of human emotions that feels rather timely.
READ MORE: Review of the True Life Drama Bomb City
Horowitz, of the Beastie Boys, is particularly good, a man not so much in a midlife crisis but bended by his lusts, which seem to corrode him from within. He is troubled and dark, and Horowitz is uncompromising in his performance. Louise Parker is also terrific, scathing and on point, feeling like an extension of her Amy Gardner character on the The West Wing. Browning has the hardest part, a film that is essentially about Naomi even though she is only the handle that spins the top. This is an unusual film, soft, gentle, and lacking (purposefully) the more excitable dramatic moments many in the genre have made fixed, instead, making this a uniquely moving experience well worth discovering.