James Y. Lee
It’s a stroke of fascinating irony that Arthur Schnitzler’s Late Fame was written in 1895 but was only discovered among his preserved collection of works and published posthumously in 2014. In it, Schnitzler unfurls the tale of Eduard Saxberger, an aging poet far past his prime who currently works as a civil servant, suddenly crowned the patron saint of modern poetry by a fledgling group of young artists who’ve christened themselves the Enthusiasm Society. The gaggle of self-conscious scribes who comprise this group makes up much of Late Fame‘s character as a satire, benefiting from various forms of comfort that permit them to loudly rest on the laurels of their talent while allowing their work ethic to languish.
Schnitzler’s novella is a fascinating deconstruction of relevance, both as experienced by those who’ve lost track of it and those who label themselves artists solely for the sake of saying that they’ve attained it. You’d likely recognize the characters of the Enthusiasm Society as shallow thinkers, the kinds of over-earnest artists who believe that their adherence to specific ideologies and glib knowledge of history allows them to claim themselves as earnest believers and successors to the greats. And Saxberger is a man enchanted by the attraction the youth show to his work, briefly blinded by his second shot at small-scale fame, before he witnesses the kinds of infighting and contradictions that plague the Society’s work, and how inescapable the grasp of his age is on his life.
Late Fame, in other words, is a story of legitimately timeless merit, and it’s no wonder that Kent Jones—a fixture in film criticism, film programming, and filmmaking—was the one to recognize it, well enough to transplant it into the modern day. In his charming adaptation of Schnitzler’s novella, written by Samy Burch (best known for writing Todd Haynes’s May December), Jones tasks the great Willem Dafoe with sensitively rendering Ed Saxberger on screen, while bringing him into the center of modern-day New York as a post-office worker who once was in conversation with the writers and thinkers of the post-WWII era. The Village Voice once thought highly of his poetry collection, Way Past Go—one published indication among many that the literary world saw real promise in his writing. But those years have long since passed. Whatever life Ed leads now is mostly confined in the comfort of a modest routine, and a group of men his age he plays pool with at the local bar, none of whom know about his writerly career.
So, when Meyers (Edmund Donovan) notices Ed outside of his apartment building and hails him as a forgotten genius, wanting him to participate in the routines of the Enthusiasm Society, Ed mostly acquiesces, charmed by this burst of attention. The members of the Society greet him with open arms and include him in their plans of an upcoming reading for various works of poetry, theatre, performance, and experimental writing that they’ve been creating. But further inquiry into the members of the Society reveals cracks in the façade very plainly for Ed to see, updated from the faux-intellectual arrogance of Schnitzler’s time. (Take a shot every time they mention banning their phones and social media, and things will start getting warm around the third time you catch a member staring down at what are likely their texts.) A notable crack among them is the fact that Meyers lives in a shockingly large apartment run on Alexa voice commands, which his wealthy parents purchased for him as an “investment,” supposedly cheaper than the NYU dorms he would have lived in while completing his degree there. Little else needs to be described about his position in the Society without giving away the whole game.
One among the Society stands out; Gloria (Greta Lee, in her most standout role thus far), their only female member. She’s an actor of several years, oftentimes performing and singing ferociously for small venues and bars, and who immediately develops perhaps the sincerest form of attraction towards Ed and his work. She also seems to frequently struggle with her health and her housing, but her energy, expertly channeled and calibrated by Lee, is charged with an outward-facing ease that Ed himself seems to respect most. It’s a seductive magnetism that seems to place her most in her element when on stage—and out of place in the scope of the Society’s posturing, which Ed gets more and more of a taste for in the lead-up to their eventual reading.
Dafoe, in a strikingly sensitive and maturely subdued turn, firmly ensures that the onus of Late Fame‘s most prominent troubles doesn’t solely lie on the Society’s pretensions. For Ed, the erstwhile literary phenom’s muscle for writing hasn’t been exercised in decades. With expectations of a new work for the reading looming over his head, Ed suffers from a troubling bout of writer’s block he can’t seem to overcome. Mere minutes after Gloria tells him how wonderful he must have been when he was young, we see him loop in his head over and over a singular poetic line in a montage laden with fades and voice-over before succumbing to the disillusionment of having lost his power of literary expression. But Late Fame isn’t exactly a film to languish in moments like this, in the kind of artistic irrelevance it’s continually pointing at. The trappings of “relevance,” after all, just might be a prison of their own.
Jones is a filmmaker and critic of such piercing cultural acumen, and Burch’s writing remains so sharp here, that it comes as no surprise that they not only know how to skewer young people who feign a clout-chasing adoration for culture, but also demonstrate a real sense of empathy for those who remained briefly in its orbit. Late Fame‘s highest points are when it manages to split the difference between finding satisfaction as an artist and merely as a person and recognizes how much value the latter brings when left unconfined by the former. Indeed, the former is plagued by so much utterly devoid of value nowadays: an attention economy perverted by short-form social media, identitarian artists who believe their “differences” and not their vocabulary to be the arbiter of their artistic merit, and an ecosystem of fame overzealously devoted either to young prodigies or to long-dead canonized geniuses. Is relevance a reasonable goal to strive for when making art? Should we place so much stock in attaining it and despair so completely when it reveals itself, after so long life, to be both unnatural and elusive?
By the time Ed himself reckons with these plagues and questions, Late Fame shows its hand as a formally modest satire of legitimate sincerity, not just focused on narrative exacerbation but also truly empathetic observation. Among the most crucial scenes with Ed are the ones where he spends time with the other men his age at a bar; the eventual revelation of his poetry to them comes as a source of embarrassment, one that he tries to deflect by echoing Enthusiasm and decrying his friends as “lowbrow.” But they’re also the only reliable source of friends he has. Enthusiasm, it turns out, will fail him again and again, wanting to rope him into an artistic ecosystem he doesn’t belong in, and into a performance where he will be among the only acts of legitimate promise. By the time it all falls apart, Jones, Burch, and a fully realized Dafoe’s performance reach a place of odd contentment—the kind only reached when one finally realizes that hope in what could be has faltered, yet value still remains in what is.
