"It isn’t the story of a monster, but it’s the story of looming monstrosity, of modern people with modern ideas in the grips of unfulfilled urges and inherited assumptions. Its emotional harshness and quasi-confessional acerbity is radically untimely—and therefore enduring."
Richard Brody with some lovely words about this movie that I just can't/won't shake.
"It’s an odd thing to say this about a filmmaker who started working at such a high level so young, but Alex Ross Perry’s cinematic learning curve is itself a work of art. His new film, 'Golden Exits,' fuses the crucial themes of his three major previous films ('The Color Wheel,' 'Listen Up Philip,' and 'Queen of Earth') and paints them onto a canvas that has expanded to meet the growing dimensions of his own career. “Golden Exits” is a story of sibling rivalries and family heritage (artistic and material), of fragile marriages and bitter solitude, of solidarity and betrayal, of the possibilities of youth and the limits of encroaching middle age, of work as passion and work as burden, of the intimate relationships that develop through work, that nourish work, and that threaten work. It’s also the story of a small business—akin to a low-budget production office—which the tangled web of personal and professional connections turns into a splitting nucleus of emotional fury.
"The movie is centered on a forty-ish archivist in Brooklyn named Nick (Adam Horovitz, the former Beastie Boy) who’s working on an uneasy project: organizing the papers of the late publisher of a “little magazine” of literary renown. What makes the project uneasy is that Nick’s wife, Alyssa (Chloë Sevigny), a therapist in private practice, is the publisher’s daughter. His new job is, so to speak, a family affair, and another member of the family—Alyssa’s sister, Gwen (Mary-Louise Parker), a hard-driving businesswoman—is making it tough on Nick. Nick has been something less than a faithful husband, and Alyssa suspects that he has ulterior motives for hiring his new assistant, Naomi (Emily Browning), a twenty-five-year-old Australian woman. Naomi arrives in Brooklyn with one contact, a family friend whom she hasn’t seen since childhood—Buddy (Jason Schwartzman), who runs a small recording studio with his wife, Jess (Analeigh Tipton). Nick and Buddy both find themselves implicated in Naomi’s private life; Naomi becomes involved in the lives of the two sisters, Alyssa and Gwen; Jess’s sister, Sam (Lily Rabe), turns out to have a surprising connection to the sisters as well; and the complications of long-festering resentments and long-unsatisfied desires resound silently throughout the film.
"'Golden Exits' is Brooklyn Bergman, a drama of death pushing from behind and despair looming ahead. Working with the cinematographer Sean Price Williams, Perry responds vitally to his own emotional impulses in the presence of the actors; the dialogue that they send spinning aloft is pugnaciously lyrical, gracefully deceptive, awkwardly tender. With images of a bold simplicity, Perry parses the overlapping lines of interpersonal conflict as if in cinematic X-rays, and pushes uneasily close to the performers to fuse their flickers and tremors with those of their characters. The movie is also Bergmanesque in its geographical specificity, with the brownstones and storefronts of gentrified Brooklyn, its vestigial and picturesque touches of grunginess, coming to life with an ironically hermetic charm.
"Perry’s a cinephilic director; his very centering of the movie on an archivist invests it with the weight of artistic tradition. “Golden Exits” is a filmmaker’s story of inseparable personal and professional relationships. The theme of the fusion of romance and work is a venerable one, central to the films of Howard Hawks; Jean-Luc Godard once remarked that, if it weren’t for work, many men would have trouble getting sexually aroused. 'Golden Exits' recognizes that much of this overlap is actually sexual harassment, a threat to women’s careers, livelihoods, and dignity, resulting from such undue encroachment. It isn’t the story of a monster, but it’s the story of looming monstrosity, of modern people with modern ideas in the grips of unfulfilled urges and inherited assumptions. Its emotional harshness and quasi-confessional acerbity is radically untimely—and therefore enduring."
