Dafoe delivers award-worthy turn in contemplative look at youth, art, and aging
Based purely on its trailer, you’d be forgiven for thinking Late Fame is some sort of smug takedown of pretentious Gen Z and young millennials, something along the lines of Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young. To be sure, the film does satirize a certain type of intellectual wannabe, but its ribbing is much more gentle and empathetic than you might imagine from the trailer, which includes some of the more overt bits of skewering. Unlike Baumbach’s picture, Late Fame has a fondness and a forgiveness for all its characters, despite—or maybe because of—their flaws. It also features a career-best performance from Willem Dafoe, which is reason enough to see this beautifully rendered, evocative meditation on the enthusiasm of youth, the drive of the artistic temperament, the melancholy of growing older, and the intersection of all three.
Director Kent Jones, who hasn’t made a picture since 2019’s Top-10-worthy character study Diane, collaborates here with writer Samy Burch (May December) to adapt a posthumously published 19th-century novella of the same name by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. Jones and Burch update the late-19th-century story to present day New York City, where we meet Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe) sorting mail in a post office, a job he’s held for over 30 years. Ed enjoys a relatively quiet existence of work and playing pool with his post-office buddies, even as he ignores calls from his sister about his dying brother.
Ed’s routine is upended when he’s approached by Wilson Meyers (Edward Donovan), a young NYU grad who is a fan of Way to Go, a critically acclaimed, but now long-forgotten book of poetry Ed wrote in 1979, back when he knew counterculture luminaries like Robert Creeley, Amiri Baraka, and even William Burroughs. “You work in a post office… like Bukowski,” Meyers says admiringly, to Ed’s amusement.
Meyers (Edward Donovan), who insists on calling himself and everyone he knows by last names, leads a group of young aspiring writers and artists called The Enthusiasm Society. Besides its last name affectation, the group includes a younger member who wears a cape, a devotion to all things retro, and a philosophy that eschews modern technology and the “coarsening of culture.” That Meyers is clearly a dilettante, funded by wealthy parents, is obvious, but Ed is moved and flattered by the attention of Meyers, his group, and especially its lone female member, Gloria (Greta Lee, Past Lives), a striving stage actress. Gloria’s formal way of talking and wide-eyed reverence for Ed pique Ed’s interest, and he finds himself drawn to her and the group. He even agrees to write a poem for an upcoming reading they plan to host.
Ed’s attempt to write a new poem makes for one of the film’s best scenes, a small moment that represents Jones’s astute understanding of the creative process. We see Ed walking around New York, as the lights blur and fade, with fragments, phrases, and scraps of remembered conversations repeating themselves in his head. And yet when Ed sits down with pen and paper, he freezes. Anyone who’s ever attempted to write a story or poem will relate to this masterfully created depiction of how ideas can rattle around in our brains, but yet so often we’re unable to fully express them the way we want.
The moment, too, captures the overall poignancy of Jones’s picture. After Ed reads one of his poems on stage, a young audience member shouts out “Way to go, Grandpa!” to the startled Ed. “I used to be the youngest one in every group, and then one day, I became the oldest,” he muses. And when Gloria tells him “You must have been beautiful when you were young,” Ed knows that he’s not her contemporary, even as he’s pleased, if befuddled, by the group’s adulation. That Dafoe, at 71 years old, is himself becoming an elder of cinema only adds to the film’s nostalgic meta elements, and underscores the authenticity of his nuanced portrayal.
Burch’s wistful screenplay also contains a few surprises that help us see its characters in more than just poseur vs. genuine artist terms. Such complexity helps make Late Fame one of the year’s best films, featuring one of the year’s best performances.
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Late Fame is currently playing at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, and will open at the Orinda Theater on August 28th.
