There’s a marvellous tenderness and generosity to this elegant tale of autumnal regret; an intimate movie acted with effortless grace by Willem Dafoe. In fact, this is yet another of his almost numberless performances of intelligence and self-possession. Screenwriter Samy Burch has adapted a novella by Arthur Schnitzler, which has been directed by critic turned film-maker Kent Jones (who in 2015 made Hitchcock/Truffaut, a documentary that I very much admired). Their movie finds a new variation on the Schnitzlerian theme of life’s lost opportunities for love, lust and success, and how, as mortality’s shadow closes in, one might be tempted to risk everything for a last chance at worldly triumph.
The main character here is a distant cousin – though a wiser cousin – to the doctor in Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle or Dream Story, filmed by Kubrick as Eyes Wide Shut. Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, an old guy in New York who works in the post office, sorting mail, perhaps without the means to retire, living solo in a small but book-filled room in a humble walkup, drinking and playing pool with his buddies in the evening. One day, Saxberger is astonished to be accosted by a dandyish young hipster outside his apartment building; this is Meyers (played by Edmund Donovan), who knows something about Saxberger that nobody else does. Saxberger was once a talented young poet in the 70s New York bohemian scene and Meyers has found his long since out-of-print volume of poems, entitled Way Past Go. He declares Saxberger a neglected genius that he, and his similarly callow and excitable literary friends, are going to take up.
Flattered, amused and perhaps more thrilled by all this than he wants to admit, Saxberger starts hanging out with these young people. Moreover, Meyers (clearly wealthy and well-connected) suggests that he can get Saxberger republished. More dizzying still, the group includes a brilliant and beautiful but fascinatingly volatile actor, Gloria (a superb performance from Greta Lee), who has a kittenish crush on this stylish older man. Poor Saxberger had made his peace with failure decades ago; now, the long-forgotten thirst for glory could be stirring and perhaps the wounds of disappointment reopening. He is not so unworldly that he doesn’t grasp how attractive his “comeback” narrative is. He starts to be unforgivably snobbish and dismissive to his old drinking pals, who don’t realise that he is – or was – a poet, and begins to flirt with Gloria, whose own vulnerabilities he doesn’t see.
Dafoe shows us an awful possibility: Saxberger could be dropped by them all as capriciously as he was taken up and perhaps on the verge of a giant Gustav von Aschenbach-style humiliation, only without Von Aschenbach’s existing prestige. Perhaps the haughty, anti-smartphone airs of this group are a little strained, and it is odd that they apparently don’t know that they can get Saxberger’s book any time they like on AbeBooks.com. But this smart, literate, stylish film is a tonic and Dafoe is, of course, a pleasure for every moment he is on screen.
• Late Fame is in US cinemas now, and in UK cinemas from 4 September.
