Meet self-styled radical and aspiring poet Wilson Meyers. He inveigles 1970s poet of momentary note, Ed Saxberger, now a mail sorter, into becoming the linchpin of a cultural rediscovery rescue mission. In Meyers’ race to the bottom, Saxberger’s late fame rides side-saddle as a counterweight to the “late capitalism” that Meyers and his artist friends trendily disdain. These café-haunt poseurs are hell-bent on biting the capitalist hand that spoon-feeds them. They conspire to host a reading featuring Saxberger as the evening’s fixer-upper centerpiece.
A younger Woody Allen could have written the joke these malapropish and fawning acolytes tell on themselves in all seriousness on repeat. It punctuates a razor-sharp Indie script. The joke? They have indecorously miscast a curious but hidebound refusnik as their idol. Imagine Humpty-Dumpty knowing all about gravity. He reasonably declines to sit on the wall they fritter their lives away constructing. He views it as a self-congratulatory monument to the shared conviction that they are imbued with a superior taste in poetry, even in the absence of a talent for the writing of it.
“Late Fame” arrives as a celluloid update of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.” Its Allen-like characters goose the audience. It jolts the viewer by reaching for a Brechtian Lower Depths flavoring: it’s tempting to mistake Greta Lee’s triple-threat character Gloria for the eponymous “Elsie,” heroine of Liza Minnelli’s Sally Bowles panegyric “Cabaret” razzmatazz.
How nicely the budgetary limitations of an Indie film play here with the scriptural editorial admonition “less is better”! A clubby friend of Meyers, who runs a small publishing house, interviews Saxberger about a memoir the publisher has been misled into expecting from him. Saxberger misunderstands. He thinks the meeting is about republishing the poetry book that made him famous. Their exchange misfires in that slow, agonizing way that ill-begotten assumptions twist and turn to comply with a death wish. The publisher puts both parties to this misalliance out of their misery with the parting words, “I have a Zoom.” Any scene-lengthening farewell would go redundant. Saxberger gets it. You get it. This deal, ginned up by Meyers is stillborn. Cut to the next scene—Saxberger’s version of a strategic retreat. He climbs the decrepit yet still-reliable stairs to his mail sorter’s spare studio lodging.
The camera work is punctilious, capturing Lower Manhattan’s Neo-gothic façades tattooed by the “coarsening culture” that Meyers’ gaggle of mewling dilettantes decries. They have a point, but manage to miss by a country mile its reflection of who they are—and are not.
Dafoe turns in a performance fully invested in the Saxberger idiom: informed experience begets the patience and zest for life that inspire originality. The past is the past. Saxberger prefers living his present life of a mail sorter who shoots pool with wise-cracking coworkers to shooting himself in the foot as a flash-mob’s Ozymandic retread rediscovery. See Late Fame and ask yourself, “Can you blame him?”
Toba Singer
