Success is never really up for grabs in Kent Jones’ Soho send-up “Late Fame.” Whatever glory once attached to the aging poet at its center has long since faded, a fact this loving, low-key farce mines by leaning on the ironic promise of its title. Still, sometimes you have to fake it ’till you make it, and the more accurate “Mild Recognition” probably wouldn’t have made it all the way to the Venice Film Festival, would it?
Hell, for the most part, Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe) rarely makes it further than his neighborhood watering hole – an admittedly odd haunt for a postman several years into sobriety, though in Eric Adams’ Big Apple you settle for the company you can afford. (Perhaps Mamdani will see to that.)
Not that Ed seems to mind. He’s set in his ways and bound to his routines, his identity so knotted up with the city that he can barely find the time to return to his hometown of Whereevertheheckistan, even to visit ailing kin. But some ties are stronger than blood: A lifetime ago, Ed bought a one-way ticket to Abe Beame’s Town chasing dreams of literary grandeur, and even as poetry gave way to a pension, that hard-won sense of self still smolders.
Though the erstwhile poet can no longer afford downtown rent, the well-heeled Meyers (Edmund Donovan) certainly can – and, as luck would have it, the young man is both a rare-book aficionado (with Ed’s long-out-of-print debut among his treasures) and a collector of urban originals, including the flinty torch singer Gloria (Greta Lee). After a chance encounter and quick induction into Meyers’ circle of affluent aesthetes and their needier hangers-on, what’s left to do but put on a show?
Adapted from an 1895 novel by Arthur Schnitzler (whose work later inspired “Eyes Wide Shut”), “Late Fame” begins with a premise that could easily tilt toward a better-late-than-never redemption tale in the vein of “Searching for Sugar Man,” or, truer to the source, a more caustic and scathing class satire. Instead, Jones and screenwriter Samy Burch strike a trickier balance, taking aim at all the ripe targets – Ed once attended Cookie Muller parties in the very lofts Meyers and his ilk now treat as investment vehicles, after all – without ever turning salacious.
Instead, the film skewers and sympathizes in equal measure, mocking the pipe dreams suggested by its title and stirred by even the faintest hint of recognition, while still making clear that Ed’s literary gifts are genuinely worth the fuss. Gloria, a gifted performer with a taste for Kurt Weill, embodies a similar tension: tenacious yet worn down by the need to keep performing, in every sense, just to survive in a city and an industry that rarely shows mercy.
And though Meyers and his circle of affluent aesthetes hardly get off easy – they call themselves the Enthusiasm Society, for God’s sake – the filmmakers never go in for cheap shots.
Before enjoying a touch of late fame himself, Kent Jones had already stood at the center of American film culture as director of the New York Film Festival, bringing to this work a layered texture and a nuance too shrewd for cynicism. Of course, the members of the Enthusiasm Society are dilettantes – play-acting as bards and filling their bespoke bohemia with “more authentic” artists – but when, going back to the Renaissance, has it ever been otherwise? Who else funds poetry? What other class so fully patronized the arts?
While Ed and Gloria are clearly kindred spirits – and not just in the way they’re totemized by a wealthier clique – one can make a similar comparison between the poet and his younger benefactor. The young turks of the Enthusiasm Society are all destined to put away their childish things, and they readily admit it. But so did Ed; he simply joined the post office because he had no company to inherit.
In the meantime, why not leave a mark, put on a show, and earn a write-up you can later frame in a penthouse office overlooking Central Park? Why not channel that youthful exuberance onto the page and into a book that may well gather dust for decades, only to resurface in the hands of a reader who still feels its spark?
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