{"id":108299,"date":"2025-08-30T18:45:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T18:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/108299\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T18:45:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T18:45:09","slug":"willem-dafoe-in-a-drama-of-bohemia-then-and-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/108299\/","title":{"rendered":"Willem Dafoe in a Drama of Bohemia Then and Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn Kent Jones<\/a>\u2019s lyrical and enchanting \u201cLate Fame<\/a>,\u201d Willem Dafoe<\/a> plays a forgotten New York poet who once had a moment. It was 1979, and Dafoe\u2019s character, Ed Saxberger, was part of the downtown scene \u2014 the punks and artists and Warhol\/Waters exhibitionist misfits who were living for next to nothing in the East Village and its squalid environs, hanging out and going to loft parties, but sometimes they created things. Ed published a book of poetry, entitled \u201cWay Past Go,\u201d that placed him on the edge of what was happening. For a while, he lived the bohemian dream. But the 1980s were around the corner, and poetry doesn\u2019t pay the rent. So Ed, when we meet him in the present day, is no longer a poet. He\u2019s a man who\u2019s been working at the post office for 37 years (like Charles Bukowski did in the \u201950s and \u201960s), and he now lives a life of scruffy anonymity. Each night he hangs out at the same neighborhood bar with his working-class buddies who have no idea that he was ever a writer.<\/p>\n

\n\tEarly on, as he\u2019s walking up to his crumbly Manhattan apartment building, Ed is stopped by a young man who\u2019s watching him from across the street. The clipped, preppie fellow introduces himself as Meyers (Edmund Donovan) and explains that he read \u201cWay Past Go,\u201d and he thinks it\u2019s a masterpiece. To him, Ed isn\u2019t some ghost of a poet no one remembers; he\u2019s a god of a writer who composed something timeless. And as Meyers explains, he\u2019s not the only one who feels that way. He has a group of friends who regularly meet to talk about art and life and everything in between, and they\u2019ve all read \u201cWay Past Go,\u201d and they all think Ed is it. They want to meet him.<\/p>\n

\n\tDafoe plays this encounter with a sly crestfallen radiance. Our instinct is to imagine that Ed would be flattered and touched by knowing that someone remembers (and loves) his book. But Dafoe, with haunted eyes and a slow-dawning smile, shows you that Ed can barely take it in. It\u2019s not just that his poetry days are decades behind him; it\u2019s that he\u2019s not that person anymore. But beneath a certain Middle American diffidence, he\u2019s an affable guy, and Meyers keeps cajoling him. So after a while Ed agrees to show up at that tavern to meet his latter-day Zoomer fans.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the common observations about filmmakers like Jean Renoir, Robert Altman, and Jonathan Demme is that they see the humanity of everyone onscreen. That\u2019s abundantly true of Kent Jones, who made his first dramatic feature, the wrenching \u201cDiane,\u201d<\/a> in 2018; it starred Mary Kay Place, in a revelatory performance, as an aging boomer negotiating a past that was so alive to her you could almost touch it. Watching \u201cLate Fame,\u201d I felt the same bittersweet sting of humanity \u2014 except that what\u2019s special about Jones\u2019 voice came into even higher relief for me this time. He has a style that\u2019s very naturalistic, but in an avid way. His camera follows the actors around, tracking movements and thoughts, often coming right up to them. What\u2019s driving that camera, in a word, is curiosity.<\/p>\n

\n\tKent Jones is a filmmaker who\u2019s deeply and dramatically curious, and that\u2019s a quality he shares with the film\u2019s screenwriter, Samy Burch, who wrote \u201cMay December.\u201d In \u201cLate Fame,\u201d Jones fills the screen with people he wants to know more about. The movie, like \u201cDiane,\u201d has a fascinating central character, and once again we see that character set against a community that\u2019s supportive to a degree, though not without its insidious illusions. Ed, in \u201cLate Fame,\u201d goes on a journey \u2014 into his past, but really into the question of whether who he was and what he was can still exist in the present.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen he first shows up to meet Meyers and his friends, they would seem to have a lot in common. But Ed presents himself with a no-frills courtly reticence that\u2019s equal parts politeness and caution. He\u2019s asking himself the same thing we are: Who are these people \u2014 this new generation of poetry lovers sitting around and drinking in the East Village? In the tavern, where they occupy the big open space upstairs (across the room from a table of \u201cinfluencers\u201d they consider their nemesis), they declare and debate their passions and values. They\u2019re mostly recent college graduates, from NYU and other elite havens. They love art, real art. They dislike technology and social media. They all refer to each other by their last names, an affectation meant to evoke the toughness of the 1920s. And as a group, they call themselves the Enthusiasm Society \u2014 a dorky name, to be sure, but the dorkiness is part of it, a rebuke to the hip cynicism that walls people off from passion.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cLate Fame,\u201d which reconfigures a posthumously published novel by Arthur Schnitzler (who wrote the 1926 novella \u201cDream Story,\u201d on which \u201cEyes Wide Shut\u201d was based), takes the form of a sprawling duet between Ed and his enlightened new cult of followers and fans. What\u2019s captivating about the movie is how it uses this interface to tell a larger story: of the bohemian world then and now, and what it really meant and still means (or maybe doesn\u2019t), and of what that reflects about where all of us are. But this is also the quietly haunting and highly specific portrait of one man, Dafoe\u2019s Ed: halting, eager, resilient, defeated in many ways, but still a figure of buried yearning, and just maybe someone who\u2019s waking up a part of himself he should never have allowed to go to sleep.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat\u2019s the Enthusiasm Society about? From the outset, the character of Meyers intrigues us. Edmund Donovan makes him formal and precise, and he talks about why he values formality (it\u2019s all about the art of language, which the rest of the culture is letting whither away); he seems sincere enough. But then Ed pays a visit to Meyers\u2019 apartment. As soon as he walks into the sprawling, impeccably furnished pad, we see the real story of Meyers and his friends: that they\u2019re rich kids who are living \u2014 and, in a way, playing bohemian \u2014\u00a0on daddy\u2019s dime. (They say they hate technology, but Meyers is on very friendly terms with Siri.) Does this invalidate their orientation? Not necessarily. Meyers, for one, seems to genuinely care about literature. That said, the world of privilege is a different thing from the world of not just loving art but living for it. As \u201cLate Fame\u201d goes on, and they decide to put on a downtown poetry reading that will feature the public return of Ed Saxberger (with other bits of performance thrown in), the film meditates on whether this is a middle-class art evolution or a fatal contradiction.<\/p>\n

\n\tDafoe\u2019s performance is like a slowly unfolding wildflower. His Ed starts out as a ravaged monument, but that face gradually unclenches as he grows comfortable with his new notoriety, basking in it, even as he\u2019s aware of its built-in evanescence. Dafoe\u2019s acting becomes most hopeful, and vulnerable, when Ed is reciprocating the interest of Gloria, the only woman in the group, and maybe the one genuine bohemian. She\u2019s an actor and singer, older than the rest of them, and Greta Lee, from \u201cPast Lives,\u201d plays her like a postmodern vamp fatale from the \u201980s, a cross between Louise Brooks and Lydia Lunch (with Tura Satana\u2019s eye makeup). She\u2019s at once a professional flirt, a fabulous It Girl, an obnoxious poseur, and, as we see in the one scene where she lets the mask drop, a soulfully desperate aging ingenue who will shack up with someone for the rent. But she\u2019s also a true artist. At the poetry reading, she gets up on stage and performs Brecht\/Weill\u2019s \u201cSurabaya Johnny\u201d with a primal cabaret power that turns the song into a four-minute autobiography. She\u2019s mesmerizing.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd so is Ed when he finally gets up onstage to read a poem from \u201cWay Past Go.\u201d He had agreed to write a new poem for the occasion, but wasn\u2019t able to pull himself together to do it; true poetry, we gather, is not written on demand. But this way we get to hear the poet Ed was in his heyday, and there\u2019s a disarming double vision to it. We hear how modern the poem sounds (and by modern I mean: how trapped in its time), from the lost-world New York references to the insistent male gaze to the jagged three-dimensionality of the language. And yet\u2026it\u2019s a thing of beauty! It falls on our ears like music, and we realize that Ed truly had the gift.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut is that what his new followers, like Meyers and the ersatz-proletarian Brussard (Clay Singer), covet about him? Or do they want him around because he\u2019s a walking signifier of artistic fearlessness who they can turn into an accessory? By the end of \u201cLate Fame,\u201d Ed has passed through the looking glass of rediscovery only to pass back again. After 37 years in the post office, he has tasted life on the other side. But what he wants is what\u2019s real, and that\u2019s something bohemia may no longer have room for. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Kent Jones\u2019s lyrical and enchanting \u201cLate Fame,\u201d Willem Dafoe plays a forgotten New York poet who once…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":108300,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,61561,61562,337,4186,27253],"class_list":["post-108299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-kent-jones","tag-late-fame","tag-movies","tag-venice-film-festival","tag-willem-dafoe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108299\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}