Arthur Schnitzler’s novella “Late Fame” chronicles the renewed consideration an erstwhile poet receives from a circle of younger aspiring artists. One wintry eve, Eduard Saxberger comes dwelling to his condo to seek out an keen Wolfgang Meier itching to reward his title. Meier informs Saxberger that he learn his slim assortment of poetry, written and forgotten 30 years prior, and shared it along with his “Enthusiasm Society” of formidable writers. Meier encourages Saxberger to affix the group, who’re within the midst of organizing a studying that can debut their abilities to Vienna. Flattered and reinvigorated by their admiration, Saxberger hangs across the younger crowd and lets himself imagine that he lastly is likely to be on the point of recognition.
Written in 1895 however translated and printed inside the final decade, “Late Fame” dramatizes writerly neuroses via a portrait of generational distinction. Saxberger had lengthy since deserted the artist’s life for a civil servant job and middle-class pals when Meier “rediscovers” him. However the second he dips a toe into a creative ecosystem, albeit one populated by affected, prematurely bitter contrarians, he embraces his function as elder statesman and turns into emboldened by their respect. Although their lives couldn’t be farther from his personal, Saxberger turns into contaminated by their inventive enthusiasm, in addition to riddled with a youthful self-doubt and restlessness.
Director Kent Jones and “Might December” screenwriter Samy Burch replace and contemporize Schnitzler’s novella for the large display whereas in any other case remaining doggedly devoted to its emotional and thematic anxieties. Very similar to Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael did with Schnitzler’s “Dream Story” for “Eyes Broad Shut,” they shift the Austrian-set story to modern-day New York, however alternate that movie’s psychological menace with a wistful melancholy. Willem Dafoe stars as Saxberger, a publish workplace worker whose fleeting literary heyday is 50 years behind him. He nonetheless lives downtown, however the towering figures and the enduring haunts from his gritty Seventies youth have been gentrified out of existence. Dafoe, who equally moved to New York within the mid-’70s, imbues Saxberger with the character of a sleek, ageing urbanite, somebody who clearly ran away from his previous as a younger man earlier than changing into an intractable a part of his setting.
With the Enthusiasm Society in “Late Fame,” Schnitzler satirized the Younger Vienna collective, a bunch of writers experimenting with Modernism on the flip of the century. He gently pokes enjoyable at his friends’ disdain for careerism and trendiness whereas concealing the standard of his fictional characters’ precise literary efforts. Burch makes an attempt one thing related in her screenplay, largely with success, by turning her eye to a bunch of twenty-something trust-fund youngsters who want to instill modern tradition with a extra refined literary sensibility, one which had mainly gone the best way of the dodo lengthy earlier than they have been even born.
Proudly pretentious and opinionated, the Enthusiasm society within the movie outline themselves in opposition to their cellphone and social media-addicted friends. They give the impression of being as much as the artists they’ve learn (or heard about) and look at Saxberger as a connection to that bygone world. They’re the sort of people that declare they’re essayists not critics, as a result of they’re simply glorified influencers, with out a trace of irony. In the meantime, Saxberger sees them as pleasant oddities, kids fortunately caught out of time. Neither Jones nor Burch take predictable digs on the expense of the Enthusiasm Society, a minimum of for some time. In actual fact, “Late Fame” largely walks a powerful line of depicting their affectations and snobbery with delicate respect whereas additionally affectionately rolling their eyes at them.
Take the group’s chief Meyers (Edmund Donovan), who finds Saxberger and introduces him and his out-of-print poetry assortment to the group like his literary counterpart. He speaks in declarative sentences with out counting on “um’s” or “like’s,” lives in a lavish condo paid for by his dad and mom, and clothes impeccably. In a worse movie, he would have been an immediate goal of derision. As an alternative, the co-authors of “Late Fame” each maintain him in some regard, appreciating that he a minimum of channels his money and time into artwork. Saxberger approvingly notes to a buddy who hangs out at a neighborhood dive bar that he admires that Meyers doesn’t conceal his wealth or have an effect on the language of poverty just like the poseurs from his youth.
The theatrical Gloria (Greta Lee), a mysterious working actress who hangs with the Enthusiasm Society boys, additionally finds them charming and enjoyable, enjoying into their shared thought of her as a sophisticated determine. Saxberger shortly sees Gloria as a kindred spirit, innately sensing that her always-on-stage character masks real hustle and dedication that the opposite guys don’t really want. Lee lends Gloria a showy persona that might inevitably grate coming from a much less expert actress; she embodies a well-recognized archetype with out lowering her to a two-dimensional cliché. Her true present, nevertheless, lies in concealing her character’s reserves of knowhow and, predictably, despair that solely fitfully reveal themselves. Burch’s script equally deserves credit score for not characterizing her as a secret basket case. She’s merely somebody chasing a dream and, like Saxberger, operating away from one thing undefined.
Meyers and his clan use Saxberger and Gloria for his or her grandeur and supposed authenticity; in flip, they’re conscious they’re getting used however are pleased to play the half in alternate for his or her approval. Dafoe sells his character’s joyful shock that his work has presumably been reclaimed with aplomb; he enjoys feeding off the power of his younger compatriots, particularly as a result of they don’t share the reflexive cynicism and philistinism of his barfly pals. Saxberger buys into the concept he is likely to be on the verge of late renown. It’s solely when he agrees to a clumsy assembly with a curious literary agent, performed by a smirking Jake Lacy, arrange by Meyers that he begins to understand the naïveté and self-deluded folly of the Enthusiasm Society. They erroneously imagine artwork simply seems quite than being produced from toil and sweat.
Jones’ movie and Schnitzler’s novella each chronicle Saxberger’s eventual disillusionment with the group following a disappointing expertise at their massive studying. “Late Fame” adeptly depicts the studying itself as a combined bag instantly recognizable to anybody who has ever attended or participated in a literary occasion, i.e., a low-key, competent affair on the one hand and a behind-the-scenes mess on the opposite. But, the movie fumbles its beforehand nuanced characterizations within the last act. The group devolves into snide hypocrisy, simply one other hole group of faux wealthy youngsters as a substitute of motivated aesthetes, and Gloria turns right into a dime-a-dozen troubled actress. The movie follows Schnitzler’s narrative carefully, primarily ending in the very same place, and but the supply materials in some way feels more true than its adaptation, which presumably can’t shed itself of a sure sourness intrinsic to its fashionable context. Measured depictions barely curdle into trite stereotypes, in different phrases.
The movie by no means goes off the rails even when some flaws develop into inconceivable to disregard within the dwelling stretch. (You possibly can set your watch to when a household drama detailed through cellphone calls and voicemail will attain its foreseeable conclusion.) What saves “Late Fame” at nearly each flip is Jones’ course, which infuses even easy dialogue scenes with breezy maturity and palpable longing. Jones generally flexes with thrilling experimental prospers — the movie opens with scratchy archival downtown footage scored by raucous punk, which captures in miniature a metropolis that now not exists — and fills the soundtrack with readings of gorgeous poetry that when impressed a younger Saxberger. However “Late Fame” stuns even in its unflashy moments when it’s merely observing an evolving metropolis in movement, with photographer Wyatt Garfield infusing fashionable Manhattan with an informal, abiding dignity.
“Late Fame” bleeds a hard-earned knowledge that may solely be exhibited by somebody who has spent a long time working within the arts. “And it appeared to him that he was coming back from a brief, troublesome journey to a house that he had by no means cherished however through which he now rediscovered the tender and muffled comforts of earlier than,” writes Schnitzler close to the top of his novella. Whether or not or not Jones has ever felt that method is unclear, however he initiatives that stage of sage perception into each picture of his sophomore narrative characteristic.
Grade: B+
“Late Fame” world premiered on the 2025 Venice Movie Competition. It’s presently searching for U.S. distribution.
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