The Rückenfigur motif of Willem Dafoe's poet Ed Saxberger is returned to over and over throughout the film as we see multiple shots of him from behind, retreating up a street in the Village. This framing imbues the figure of the aging poet, hunched into his winter coat and watch cap, with a lonesome, poignant feel.
The film overall is a quiet, subtle pleasure – it’s all texture and closely detailed milieus. A poetics of small observations. Saxberger is baffled and bemused by his ardent young fans, who revere his first and only book, and disovered where he lives. They are determeind to bring him back into the spotlight. Gradually he warms to them, especially to Greta Lee’s sly slinky seductiveness.
Lee’s performance is a wonder. Charismatic and playful, she’s a diva who revels in artifice. When the gap between her carefully crafted persona and her banal actual life is revealed to Ed – it’s a letdown. A grimmer reality intrudes into the film’s delicate ecosystem of theatrical self-presentation and ambition. Yet she retains her dignity. She comes across as a latter day cross between Anna Karina and Dietrich. Her performance of Brecht & Weill’s “Surabaya Johnny” is spellbinding.
The dynamics of the Enthusiasm Society, as they call themselves, are amusingly portrayed, its earnest members seen as serious supplicants to Art with a capital A but their foibles and pretensions are presented with sympathy rather than condescension. The film depicts this little group as a microcosm ruled by what Freud called "the narcissism of small differences."
This group eventually fractures and its decay parallels the minor tumult that upsets the group of Ed’s pool buddies, a humbler lot who have no truck with poetry. When Ed, who’s worked at the post office for decades, discloses that he once wrote a well-received book of poems, Way Past Go, it disturbs the equilibrium of this second little group (all men, too), who resent what they perceive as cultural elitism. Yet they work past it and find a way to return to the status quo ante.
The “fame” in “Late Fame” is gently ironic: no write up in the Times, no Terry Gross interviews or even re-issuing of Ed’s book. It amounts to little more than a belated coterie recognition: a group reading by the Society featuring Ed, who is unable to write a new poem for the event and instead reads something from “Way Past Go.” For an original poem in an indy film it more than passes muster: modestly scaled, intimate, mapping out a small personal romantic crisis Standard period style but delivered with gravity and grace by Dafoe. While he turns in a remarkably gentle performance, the story never gives much of an account of why Ed stopped writing and somehow it doesn’t seem much to matter.
His case is similar, up to a point, to that of late modernist British poet Basil Bunting (1900-1985) who’d enjoyed success with his first few books “Redimiculum Matellarum” (1930) and “The Spoils,” (1950) but then stopped writing till a brash young poet named Tom Pickard looked him up, much as Meyers does Ed in the film, and goaded him into returning to poetry. The result was a masterpiece: “Briggflatts” (1966).
There's no such triumph in "Late Fame". Its joys are modest and yet also more complex. Such a confrontation with one’s past might completely unnerve a person. But Ed’s inner gyroscope stays steady. He has a few outbursts of irritation but overall his posture is one of wry bemusement end curiosity.
“Late Fame” is a memory play, evoking the heyday of the second New York School c. late 70s, when poets invented fresh idioms for conveying the erotics of experience and consciousness, breaking loose of repressive forms and carrying forward the spontaneity and liveliness of Olson, O’Hara, and Schuyler (who gets name-checked). That vibrant energy is what the Society longs to tap into. Jones carefully avoids film outright sentiment or nostalgia.He refrains from lamenting what has been lost, simply depicting the complicated emotional interactions between a group of ambitious yet estranged people trying to make connections between a perceived heroic past and the present.
It’s a refreshing antidote to the middling range of bombastic blockbusters that have flooded screens this summer, like the hyperinflated “The Odyssey,” the unspeakable “Spider-Man Whatever” or the pathetic “Disclosure Day,” all films that have scarcely a moment of actual human recognition and connection; all films predicated on what Manny Farber called “White Elephant Art.” Grandiose productions of behemoth proportions; marmoreal and stiff.
Above all, Jones is a discreet and sympathetic observer. He gets a subtle, nuanced performance from Dafoe who has seldom been better, playing Ed with wistful irony. No tingeses of regret. He is not a haunted poet (like most fhe poets I know, myself included). In a way he's fascianting blank. A man nearly wihtout any history. The main end titles close with a touching dedication to Jones’ longtime friend, the poet Peter Gizzi. Hard to imagine a better coda.
