Katie Says Goodbye
I have waited a while after viewing Katie Says Goodbye, but perhaps that is not entirely a bad thing. Some movies entertain you for a couple of hours and are quickly forgotten. Others linger. This one lingered.
Katie Says Goodbye is a bleak, quietly disturbing film about poverty, isolation, exploitation, and, perhaps most importantly, what happens when optimism exists in a place where there seems to be very little reason for it.
Katie, played beautifully by Olivia Cooke, is a seventeen-year-old waitress living with her unemployed mother in a trailer park in a small rural Arizona community. She works at a roadside diner and supplements her income by having sex for money with several older men. She is saving toward a very specific dream: leaving Arizona for San Francisco and attending beauty school.
What makes the film unusual is Katie herself. She does not seem to view herself as a victim. In her mind, what she is doing is a means to an end. She has a plan, she is earning money, and every dollar saved moves her a little closer to another life. Her almost relentless optimism initially seems naive, but as the movie progresses, it becomes both her most admirable quality and her greatest vulnerability.
Olivia Cooke is exceptional in the role. Katie's innocence could easily have become unbelievable or even irritating, yet Cooke gives her a warmth that made me care about her increasingly as the story progressed. She smiles when most people would be angry. She forgives when most would walk away. She continues to believe in people long after they have given her reasons not to.
The bleakness of Katie Says Goodbye goes well beyond the things that happen to Katie. It is built into the world she inhabits. The trailer park, diner, dusty roads and vast Southwestern landscape create the feeling of a community almost forgotten by the world outside it. There is little money and even less opportunity. For many of the people around Katie, merely getting through another day seems to have replaced any expectation of getting somewhere better.
That is where I found the social commentary particularly interesting.
The film is not simply about a young woman making bad choices. It depicts an environment in which poverty and limited opportunity have affected what people expect from life and, perhaps more disturbingly, what they have come to expect from one another. Sex, money, affection and survival become intertwined. Exploitation is not presented as something extraordinary. It has become part of everyday life.
Even the men who surround Katie are more complicated than they initially appear.
Bear, an older trucker played by Jim Belushi, pays Katie for sex, yet paradoxically becomes one of the people who treats her with a degree of tenderness. Bruno, the ex-convict Katie falls in love with, represents something entirely different to her. She does not want his money. She wants a future with him. Matty, a young man much closer to Katie's age, is attracted to her without the financial transaction that defines her relationships with the older men. Dirk represents something considerably darker: the sense of sexual entitlement that develops when Katie's reputation becomes more important to the men around her than Katie herself. Critics have similarly noted the uncomfortable contrast between Bear's kindness and the treatment Katie receives from others.
Matty is particularly interesting because he prevents the film from offering us an easy "good man" alternative. There is a difference between liking someone and possessing the courage to stand up for that person when it matters. In Katie's world, weakness can inflict damage just as surely as cruelty.
The women do not escape scrutiny either. Maybelle, Katie's boss at the diner, offers something approaching maternal warmth. Katie's actual mother, Tracey, offers very little stability at all. Katie is essentially supporting the household, and the eventual betrayal by her mother is especially devastating because home should have been the one place where Katie did not have to protect herself.
This is what I think the movie does particularly well. It does not portray poverty merely as not having enough money. It shows how prolonged poverty, isolation and a lack of opportunity can influence relationships, expectations and morality. People adapt. Some become predatory. Some become passive. Some resign themselves to circumstances they no longer believe can change.
Katie refuses to do that.
San Francisco therefore becomes much more than a destination on a map. To Katie, it represents possibility. She believes there is another life somewhere beyond those dusty roads, and almost everything she does is connected to reaching it. She is not simply trying to leave Arizona. She is trying to escape the expectations that have been placed upon her there.
There is also an uncomfortable hypocrisy in the way Katie is treated. Men are willing to purchase what she sells, yet she bears the stigma for selling it. Once her reputation becomes common knowledge, the fact that Katie has willingly had sex with some men is treated by others as though it has eliminated her right to refuse anyone. One contemporary critique of the film identified essentially this same social contradiction: an economically disadvantaged young woman is pushed toward sex work and then punished by the society around her for doing it.
That aspect of the movie is difficult to watch, particularly as Katie's optimism becomes increasingly defenseless against people who mistake kindness for weakness.
My one significant reservation is the ending.
I understand the decision to leave Katie's future ambiguous. After everything that has happened, she finally leaves. Perhaps the important thing is simply that she is moving rather than remaining trapped in the life we have watched. We see her on the highway, beginning another journey, but we are not told where that journey ultimately takes her.
I was somewhat "eh" about that choice. I did not need a conventional happy ending. I did not need Katie arriving in San Francisco with swelling music, a new apartment and a promise that everything would be fine. That probably would have felt dishonest after the film that preceded it.
I did, however, want a little more.
After investing so much emotionally in Katie and watching so much taken from her, I wanted some indication that she was moving toward something rather than simply moving away. Even another few minutes might have provided that without tying everything into a neat bow. Instead, the movie asks us to say goodbye to Katie at essentially the same moment she says goodbye to the life she has known.
Perhaps that is precisely the point.
We do not get to know whether Katie makes it because Katie herself does not know.
Despite my reservation about the ending, I enjoyed Katie Says Goodbye very much. "Enjoyed" may actually be an odd word for a movie this sad. It is intimate, uncomfortable and at times genuinely difficult to watch. Yet it is also compassionate, and Olivia Cooke gives Katie an emotional presence that carries the film.
Beneath the story of a young woman trying to escape a small Arizona town is a much larger examination of poverty, sexual double standards, resignation and the ways people use one another when opportunity has become scarce.
Most of all, however, it is about a young woman who continues to believe there is something better waiting beyond the horizon, even after nearly everyone around her has given her reason to stop believing. I only wish the movie had allowed us to travel with her a little farther.
Director:
Wayne Roberts
Main Cast:
Olivia Cooke (Katie)
Christopher Abbott (Bruno)
Mireille Enos (Tracey)
Mary Steenburgen (Maybelle)
Jim Belushi (Bear)
Keir Gilchrist (Matty)
Chris Lowell (Dirk)
