“You have to have been lovely if you had been younger,” Greta Lee says to Willem Dafoe at one level in Kent Jones’s Late Fame, and for these of us who properly keep in mind the actor’s youthful years — again when his pores and skin was porcelain, his cheekbones sea-cliff sharp, and his eyes so angelically haunted — it’s arduous to not shout “Amen!” again on the display. First, the road hits as a result of it really works throughout the context of the movie: Ed Saxburger (Dafoe) is a postal employee who in his youth revealed a well-regarded however little-read e-book of poems, and he’s within the midst of fondly (and melancholically) recalling all of the promise of these early years in New York, when poetry was within the air, “downtown was one other world, and Soho was like being on the moon.” But it surely additionally helps the film attain past the display; a few of us would possibly start to share Saxburger’s reveries together with our personal.
The road additionally means that Lee’s Gloria Gardner, a downtown actress with an aura of thriller to her, appreciates Saxburger on this second not for who he’s, however for who he as soon as was and the world he as soon as belonged to. (Although, let’s face it: Dafoe nonetheless seems fairly nice.) Loosely tailored from an Arthur Schnitzler novella, Late Fame, because the title implies, follows Saxburger’s rediscovery by an odd group of younger writers and thinkers calling themselves “the Enthusiasm Society.” Led by the rich and snobbish Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan), who makes positive to inform Saxburger he purchased his e-book at “Foyle’s on Charing Cross Street” with ever the slightest of pretend English accents, these pampered dandies “stand towards negativity” and the monetization of every little thing. They converse of the previous virtues, they name one another by their final names, they talk about Huge Essential Literary Concepts over costly wine dinners, and so they rail towards influencer tradition and expertise and cellphone habit. However after all, they’re simply as glued to their gadgets and obsessive about their model. Meyers has Amazon Alexa tech in his Sullivan St. residence (which may be very good, very costly, and paid for by his dad and mom), and a $1200 first version of The Bare Lunch on show. We collect the opposite members of the Enthusiasm Society aren’t a lot completely different; Meyers says one man’s household “owns each soybean within the state of Missouri.” (He additionally claims the Enthusiasm Society stands above politics, although in a movie extra firmly grounded in at this time’s world they’d most likely be Dimes Sq.-adjacent, which is to say, not above politics in any respect.)
Schnitzler was a grasp of narrative excessive idea in his day. Each time I see a plot description of one in all his works, I discover myself eager to learn the story instantly. And the premise of Late Fame is so fascinating that one needs to forgive its shortcomings and concentrate on what it does so properly, beginning with a really nice and nuanced position for Dafoe, whose bodily presence can evoke coarse sturdiness and emotional delicacy on the identical time. Saxburger has a troublesome exterior; he’s reserved and unassuming in his demeanor; he avoids his sister’s calls about his dying brother, and he pushes again modestly towards Meyers and his buddies’ anointing him as America’s nice undiscovered poet. However we additionally see that he as soon as had artwork in him, and ambition, too. And we perceive that such interior reserves of sensitivity aren’t at all times a very good factor: After one triumphant studying, he hears somebody yell out, “Strategy to go, grandpa!” and that one quip from that one random unseen particular person kicks eats away at him the remainder of the night.
Additionally doing glorious work right here is Lee, who provides the vampish and self-consciously synthetic Gloria a magnetic interior life. She’s not a author, appears barely older than these younger wannabes, and we suspect she’s not almost as wealthy; the extra brazen and assured she is, the extra we are able to inform there’s much more occurring. This character most likely twists by way of essentially the most dramatic extremes over the course of the movie (together with a riveting cabaret efficiency of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Surabaya Johnny”), and it’s to Lee, Jones, and screenwriter Samy Burch’s credit score that the extra we discover out about her, the much less we truly find out about her.
So, that’s the excellent news. Sadly, Late Fame stumbles relating to its scenes with the Enthusiasm Society itself, which is unlucky as a result of that’s arguably essentially the most attention-grabbing factor within the image, at the least at first. However they’re in the end too cartoonish for a movie that in any other case feels so lived-in. It’s not that such tonal shifts can’t work, however right here the comic-ridiculous remedy of those well-meaning poseurs appears pushed by narrative comfort and the irresistibility of low cost laughs fairly than something resembling an interior life or noticed actuality. Come to consider it, Burch’s Oscar-nominated script for Might December had a equally slippery high quality, however there it benefited from the deft hand of director Todd Haynes, whose work has at all times existed in a queasy tonal slipstream. Jones is a proficient filmmaker — I used to be as soon as on a Tribeca jury that gave his masterful earlier characteristic Diane (2018) a number of well-deserved awards — and Late Fame has some true virtues. However because it proceeds, it feels much less assured. Nonetheless, Dafoe and Lee are so good, and the thought behind the story so enchanting, that I maintain wishing it had been higher. Possibly someday I’ll persuade myself it’s.
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