“There’s a marvellous tenderness and generosity to this elegant tale of autumnal regret; an intimate movie acted with effortless grace by Willem Dafoe,” said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.
Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, an ageing New Yorker who works for the post office, living alone in a small, book-filled room, drinking and playing pool with his friends in the evening.
One day, he is amazed to be accosted by “a dandyish young hipster” outside his apartment building; this is Meyers (Edmund Donovan), who has found Saxberger’s long-since out-of-print volume of poems. He declares him a neglected genius; he and his rich, “callow and excitable” literary friends take up his cause, and want to use their connections to get him republished.
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Amused, and more thrilled than he wants to let on, Saxberger finds the attention of these young people dizzying – particularly because one of them, a beautiful and volatile actress (the “superb” Greta Lee), has “a kittenish crush” on him.
Director Kent Jones has great fun with these “achingly mannered” aesthetes, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. They call themselves the “Enthusiasm Society”, and describe their meetings as “fermentations”; one of them even “wears a cape”. But “drama pulses under the comedy, too”, and a “cool astringency” grows.
“Late Fame”, adapted from a novella by the Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler, is “razor-sharp on class and art”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. Unearned riches, it tells us, “are mostly for the rich”.
In the end, “it’s Dafoe’s film”. It’s a reminder that he’s often at his best when he’s not at full stretch in “loony mode” (as in “Poor Things” or “The Northman”). “He’s in nearly every frame, quiet and serious, achingly sympathetic. It’s worth watching just for him.”
