Late Fame

Willem Dafoe is in quiet and self-effacing mode in this bittersweet comedy drama based on the Arthur Schnitzler novella about Ed, a long-retired poet rediscovered by a clique of young New York hipsters determined to lionise him until he re-enters their bohemian world by way of writing a memoir.

To make matters worse, Dafoe is caught in a pincer movement between his new admirers and his drinking buddies from the post office, where he works in a humble self-imposed purgatory. The former inflate his ego and the latter pop it with a verbal pinprick. Just as well, then, that Greta Lee’s slinky seductress is there to provide some May-to-December succour, should he feel the need.

Loose, documentary-style camerawork traps the protagonist in his ordinary life as it captures its repetitive quotidian routines. He lives in a gloomy, wintry, lonely little world, ambling between his equally drab work and home lives. But there are pools of white-yellow warmth lurking among the washed-out blue-grey New York anti-light, so he’s always reminded of the tiny passing possibilities of escape from his daily drudgery, whence ever they might come.

Still, the hip coffee houses where his new fans hang out are no more plush or impressive than the grimy, unadorned dive bars where he knocks pool balls around all night long. So straight away there’s a clue that his new world might be no braver nor better than his old one.

The setting is distinctly downtown, perhaps the slightly more affordable fringes of Greenwich Village. The conflict of Ed’s two states of mind is sublimated in walk-and-talk tracking shots through dingy, surprisingly sparsely populated streets, but the Midtown skyscrapers loom in the distance if you’d care to look for a symbol of the towering achievements of his ever-more-distant past.

Director Kent Jones introduces various thematic dichotomies – young and old, rich and poor, fake and authentic, aesthete and philistine. Then, by way of Mike Selemon’s snappy, sometimes hypnagogic transitions, he slaloms between them without prejudice, finding them to be worse than useless.

The contrast between Dafoe’s soft-spoken everyman likeability and his young friends’ smug pretensions is wittily spelled out in Samy Burch’s fleet-footed screenplay, but nicely downplayed in the performances. The overall effect is a pleasing balance of satirical comedy and gentle drama, of a flavour that fans of Alexander Payne would immediately recognise.

Willem Dafoe maintains a stoical stone face when we meet him, hardening into a defensive frown when first approached by these strange youths. But once it dawns on him what they’re after, he cracks open just long enough for a half-smile of long-forgotten delight. He may suffer from the disease of artistic integrity, but he’s only human. Besides – maybe it’s never really been challenged before.

Dafoe’s Ed seems like a citizen of nowhere in the film’s social stratification, and it’s intriguingly unclear whether or not he likes it that way. He embodies that unique emotion where shame and pride struggle to occupy the same space at the same time, and a mostly unexplored subplot about his ill brother allows it to emerge in ways that defy our usual impulse to like him.

Edmund Donovan seizes the role of the group’s self-styled impresario, imbuing his every line of dialogue with baroque precision, in the finest tradition of the least bearable arty-farty stereotypes. Yet his character is made palatable by quick self-awareness when Dafoe prompts him with not unreasonable questions about his true intentions as a suitor.

With delicious counter-intuition, Greta Lee conceals her motives beneath a guileless, flirtatious ebullience. We’re never too sure why she even hangs out with these dorks, or with our dear ageing hero, and her femme-fatale mannerisms and dress sense make her a mysteriously sore thumb.

Late Fame is a designedly shambolic and thoroughly captivating parable of lives and friends lost and found. It works because it regards its characters and their foibles with a wry eye that sees both the absurdity and the heroism of the creative life, in a world that unthinkingly disdains such a thing.

-Stew Mott-