LATE FAME – Review by Valerie Kalfrin
Late Fame is not so much about a frustrated artist but about someone who, having enjoyed fame once, wonders later in life if he really wants such attention again.
Directed by Kent Jones (Diane), this lived-in New York story stars an understated Willem Dafoe (The Phoenician Scheme) as Ed Saxberger, a bohemian poet of the 1970s now sorting mail as a postal worker. Saxberger lives alone in a modest apartment of bookshelves and cassette tapes of poetry, but mostly, he’s content to shoot pool and joke around with other guys at a neighborhood bar where the female barkeep without asking sets out his favorite sandwich.
One day outside his apartment building, Meyers (Edmund Donovan, Tell Me Lies) approaches, all awe and accolades about Saxberger’s collection of poems from years ago. “A man of letters,” he says when Saxberger reveals his postal job, causing the older man to smile.
Meyers invites Saxberger to visit his regular writers’ group. Someone’s a playwright, someone else an essayist, and all stammer to their feet upon hearing Saxberger’s name. Soon, they’re peppering him with questions about his contemporaries, offering drinks and dinner, and inviting him to join a reading they have planned. Saxberger is touched by their energy and apparent earnestness, even if he muses Meyers is “pretentious like something out of an Edith Wharton novel.”
Based on a late-nineteenth-century story by Arthur Schnitzler, Late Fame is a character study whose interactions linger after the movie ends. The script by Samy Burch (Coyote vs. Acme) is rich with details straddling the line between aspiration and artifice but also laugh-out-loud moments, such as when Meyer sneers at the influencers at the coffee shop as addicts. “Heroin?” asks Saxberger before Meyers clarifies, “Phones.” Meanwhile, someone in the group orders absinthe just for the flair but doesn’t bother to drink it.
Cinematographer Wyatt Garfield and editor Mike Selemon highlight Saxberger’s enchantment with these new acquaintances, from the closeups and soft glow of wood-paneled restaurants to a round of goodnights from below Saxberger’s window, a flourish befitting a star. Saxberger soon becomes infatuated with Gloria (Greta Lee, Toy Story 5), an actress in the group, flirtatious yet cagey. Gloria aches to live and be known as an artist yet seems to be working much too hard at it, down to her slinky dresses, feathers, and wigs. Costume designer Carisa Kelly likewise adds subtext to Saxberger’s workaday knits and Meyers’s fur hat and turtlenecks.
This group drops all the right names, but there’s a performative quality to their talk of truth and enlightenment. There’s nothing more exciting, Gloria notes at one point, than a rediscovered male genius. The grounded Saxberger wonders what happens to the female ones.
Dafoe plays Saxberger as at first flummoxed and humble, exhilarated by these younger writers, fiery and embarrassed around his longtime friends, then almost wistful as he reads from the work that brought him recognition, a lifetime of memories packed into words he’d written decades earlier. Late Fame isn’t about highbrow versus lowbrow, second chances or missed opportunities, but the ebb of contentment and ambivalence. It’s like pulling an old jacket from the closet, admiring how it still fits, and tucking it back with the box of snapshots and news clippings—still cherished, just another chapter.
