Late Fame (15)

Ed Saxberger is part of the furniture in his quietly thrumming Manhattan mailroom. Out of the blue, a 20-something called Meyers approaches Ed outside his apartment block and lavishes compliments on his long-forgotten collection of poetry, Way Past Go. He asks Ed to accompany him to a nearby meeting of The Enthusiasm Society where a small coterie of poets, artists, essayists and intellectuals regularly celebrate the written word.

LondonNet Film Review

Late Fame (15) Film Review from LondonNet

There is no expiry date on creativity in Kent Jones’s thoughtful character study, adapted for the screen by Samy Burch from Arthur Schnitzler’s novella. Shot on location in New Jersey, Late Fame is galvanised by a quietly commanding performance from Willem Dafoe as a 60-something United States Postal Service worker, whose 1979 collection of poetry suddenly finds an audience. Belated adulation is a jolt of adrenaline to someone who hasn’t penned verse for years. Youth is wasted on the young but it’s an invigorating tonic to a Baby Boomer who contentedly reflects, “I had my time, it ended”…

Ed Saxberger (Dafoe) is part of the furniture in his quietly thrumming Manhattan mailroom. He is a creature of self-imposed habit, eating the same sandwich at a neighbourhood bar in the company of drinking buddies who don’t know him well enough to comfortably call him a true friend. Out of the blue, a 20-something called Meyers (Edmund Donovan) approaches Ed outside his apartment block and lavishes compliments on his long-forgotten collection of poetry, Way Past Go. “You made a masterpiece, whether people know about it or not,” gushes Meyers.

He asks Ed to accompany him to a nearby meeting of The Enthusiasm Society where a small coterie of poets, artists, essayists and intellectuals regularly celebrate the written word. After fervent persuasion, Ed attends and is warmly embraced by the core group comprising Meyers, Brussard (Clay Singer), Carmichael (Arthur Langlie), Sherfey (Graham Campbell) and Winn (Luca Padovan). A sole female voice, absinthe-sipping stage actor Gloria (Greta Lee), is permitted to infiltrate this bastion of white male privilege and she is delighted when Ed agrees to write new work for a forthcoming reading.

Late Fame rests comfortably on Dafoe’s broad shoulders and he subtly fleshes out a multi-layered character who comes alive in the company of a younger generation that rejects technology, mocks influencers and experiential creators, and boldly professes to be “standing up against negativity, vulgarisation, the monetisation of everything”. Jones’s camera frequently lingers on Dafoe’s face, capturing the microexpressions that convey how Ed feels about The Enthusiasm Society and its ideals.

Lee fizzes with energy from the moment she slinks beguilingly on screen and bemoans the sudden loss of a key member of cast of her latest stage play to “an episode of some police procedural on network television… it’s obscene!”. Dafoe’s mailman can’t take his twinkling eyes off Gloria and nor can we. It’s a revelatory performance in stark contrast to her quiet, introspective work in Oscar-nominated drama Past Lives. Burch’s script is elegantly stitched together with meaty dialogues and the cast, particularly Dafoe and Lee, savour the rhythms of language. Poetry in emotion.

– Sarah Lee