About midway through Kent Jones’ “Late Fame,” I heard the last thing I ever expected to hear at the New York Film Festival: the voice of Ezra Pound. The aged speaker is not identified, nor is the poem he’s reciting; if you don’t know one or both, it won’t register. The film’s protagonist, Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe), is a New York poet who quit writing verse decades before but still listens to the greatest hits of yesteryear. That’s how he happens to put on a recording of Pound reading his Canto LXXXI: What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross/What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee/What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.
In Jones’ extraordinary comedy-drama, Ed, now a longtime employee of the post office, is accosted one night in front of his downtown apartment building by a young man (Edmund Donovan) who professes not only to know the one book of the older man’s verse that was published in 1979, but to revere it. More than that, he is part of a group of young New Yorkers, the self-styled Enthusiasm Society, who likewise cherish his work. Once he’s persuaded to visit the group, Ed finds a collective of earnest twentysomethings from various creative disciplines who look to the past for orientation and inspiration.
“Late Fame” was scripted by Samy Burch from a fiction by Arthur Schnitzler, which sharply satirized the bohemianism of early 20th century Vienna. But satiric skewering isn’t what Burch and Jones are up to here. They ask us to take their 21st century bohos with a measure of seriousness, albeit with a smile and perhaps a raised eyebrow. They stand purposefully against a culture of “influencers” and internet drivel. Who wouldn’t agree with that?
Their choice of cultural avatars is interesting. They know Ginsberg and Burroughs, but little or nothing beyond the Beat era, it seems. Although it’s never said, it could be that Ed’s 1979 verse represents the end of the long, noble tradition they worship, after which came the deluge of mass media rubbish. Also interesting is that most of their literary heroes belong to New York culture. Which is why it’s curious that the pinnacle of their literary pantheon at one point is summarized as “Whitman, Pound, Williams.” The middle name in that trinity not only wasn’t a New Yorker but was arguably American literature’s most notorious antisemite.
In the film’s press notes, Jones says, “It was very important to me to deal with real poetry in the movie … Pound is obviously a problematic figure from a political standpoint, but his greatest poetry and his effect on the world of poetry is something else again—that’s why Ginsberg and Pasolini paid homage to him.” Jones’ choice of how to represent “real poetry” was a bold one, and in my view, it connects his film with two others I saw in the initial NYFF press screenings. All three are by independent directors based (formerly in one case) in New York, and their films suggest interesting, if very different, relationships between film and poetry–and our current cultural moment and the past.
The three films appear in the context of the New York Film Festival’s 63rd edition, which runs Sept. 26-Oct. 13 at Lincoln Center. This year’s schedule is varied and promising. Among the highlights: Cannes’ Palme d’Or winner “It Was Just an Accident” by Iranian master Jafar Panahi; Venice’s Golden Lion winner “Father Mother Sister Brother” by Jim Jarmusch; two by Richard Linklater, “Nouvelle Vague” and “Blue Moon,” the latter with Ethan Hawke in an acclaimed performance as Lorenz Hart; two by Romanian provocateur Radu Jude, “Dracula” and “Kontinental ’25”; the world premiere of Bradley Cooper’s comedy “Is This Thing On?”; biopic “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” with Jeremy Allen White as the Boss; “Anemone,” starring Daniel Day-Lewis in a film directed by his son; “The Secret Agent” by Brazil’s Kleber Mendonça Filho; Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly” starring George Clooney as – what else – a movie star; Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s Cannes prize winner “Sentimental Value“; and Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite“. And that’s just a partial list.
To return to “Late Fame”: The members of the Enthusiasm Society that Ed Saxberger encounters are believable as contemporary New Yorkers even if their interests belong to bygone times. They are not all poets–there’s a playwright, a critic (oops, make that an essayist), and so on–and they sport the affectation of identifying each other only by their last names. Their apparent leader, the one who first met Saxberger, is Meyers, and he appears a bit older than the others. All are male, with one very notable exception: Gloria (Greta Lee), an actress who plays the roles of mother figure, temptress, shape-shifter, romantic ideal, betrayer, etc.
Saxberger is initially surprised and baffled by the hero worship visited on him, but he quickly softens as he sees the admiration is genuine. An early turning point in their relationship comes one day when he’s invited to Meyers’ home. He finds a large, impeccably decorated apartment adorned with blown-up covers of books by William Carlos Williams and others. This revelation leads Ed, who grew up working-class, to the realization that not just Meyers but other (or all?) members of the group are the products of wealthy families. Does this invalidate their cultural enthusiasms? Or merely invite us to understand them in the context of today’s burgeoning class differences?
In the film’s first act, we witness both the attraction and the growing tension between Saxberger and his disciples. They are planning an event and are insistent that he read a poem at it. He refuses to read anything new as he stopped writing years before, but he reluctantly agrees to let Gloria read one of his old poems. The tale’s second act showcases two remarkable performances, though not the ones we earlier expected. One is Gloria’s extraordinary rendition of the Kurt Weill/Bertold Brecht song “Surabaya Johnny.” The other, which happens after Gloria fails to appear to read Saxberger’s poem, features Ed himself rising to the occasion and reciting a poem that not only seems to fit the lineage of “Whitman, Pound, Williams,” but also suggests how he may have reached the stage of burnout years before.
I found the film the film to this point incredibly captivating due to the very subtle and ingenious writing and the three terrific performances at its center. As Saxberger, Willem Dafoe, one of our greatest actors, gives a career-best performance that captures the poet’s mix of intelligence, exhaustion and lingering aspiration. As Gloria, Greta Lee adds to her outstanding work in “Past Lives” with a brilliant turn that creates a woman of complex talents, ambitions and fears. And Edmund Donovan’s Meyers is a revelation, a portrait of a man intoxicated by the past but unsure of how to handle the group he’s formed to worship it.
Although full admiration for “Late Fame,” I must admit that I found its third act less than fully satisfying. Partly that may be because the questions it poses are difficult, or well-nigh impossible, to answer persuasively. But the film chooses to ask such cogent and fascinating questions, and does so with wit and imagination, that it emerges as one of the year’s best.
Exemplifying a rather different idea of poetry, Ira Sachs’ “Peter Hujar’s Day” had an unusual beginning. In 1974, the writer Linda Rosenkrantz had the idea of asking various artist friends to sit with her over a tape recorder and narrate what was they did the previous day. These talks were supposed to result in a nonfiction book, but that never materialized. And the tapes she made in her apartment with photographer Peter Hujar were lost. What survived were transcripts of the tapes, which resurfaced a few years ago.
Sachs’ film restages that conversation with two Brit actors, Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, playing Hujar and Rosenkrantz. Hujar thinks the day before was boring, and it may have been somewhat typical, but his unfolding recollections make clear that it was also full of incident and, perhaps more importantly, endless thoughts about what these things meant to him.
Some of his interactions involve famous folk. He recounts a conversation with friend Susan Sontag, who’s about to fly off to Paris. The longest anecdote describes his New York Times assignment to photograph Allen Ginsberg, whose dingy E. 10th St. digs Hujar seems to regard as hipper than his own E. 12th St. pad. He tells about the minor hassles he encountered in reaching Ginsberg and getting him to pose (the poet doesn’t want a standard portrait) and then his thoughts turn to how much he’s getting paid. (He’s doing work for Vogue and other top publications, so he seems to be earning a decent living.)
Sachs’ film clearly can’t be described as a drama. It certainly has elements of documentary, as some of his previous films, especially his striking debut, The Delta, have. In terms of documenting urban areas, his two great subjects have been Memphis, where he grew up, and New York, his home as an adult. In this outing, he obviously wants to offer an accurate evocation not just of a place but also of a time (roughly the same as that referred to in Late Fame: the 1970s) and a cultural milieu. And for Sachs, that milieu conjures not only a certain chapter in downtown art history but also of “queer history”: Hujar, whose work has grown in reputation in recent years, died of AIDS related causes in 1987 at the 53.
Those personal and cultural resonances, as well as the film’s documentary-like precision in evoking them, are reasons why I would submit “Peter Hujar’s Day” as an example of poetic cinema. And there’s another: the beauty and understated elegance to Sachs’ photographic approach to the film. One decision he made I think was absolutely right: he doesn’t show us any of Hujar’s photographs, or photos of him, even in the closing credits. Instead, he uses various techniques–shifting focus, zooms, changing lighting patterns, and an intent gaze at Whishaw (who is brilliantly low-key)—to give us a cinematographic document that again and again testifies to the poetic nature of the medium, something that’s present in every film but is strikingly crucial in this one.
The poetic aspect of Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind” is different from those of the two films discussed above, and for well over half of this sly, droll film, you might not even suspect it. Reichardt’s story begins in 1970 Framingham, Massachusetts, and tells of a guy named Mooney (Josh O’Connor), who lives an unremarkable suburban life with his wife and two young sons, but craves more. So he conceives of heisting four modernist paintings from a local museum, and enlists three lowlifes as accomplices. Rather haphazardly, the bandits succeed in making their way out of the museum with paintings in tow.
But Mooney’s life doesn’t get any simpler. His problems were probably inevitable given that he’s an amateur criminal, prone to mistakes that professionals surely wouldn’t make. How to hide the paintings? One indelible scene has him hauling them, with no small difficulty, into the loft of a barn, with grunting pigs his only company.
Soon enough, his family and dim accomplices left behind, he’s on his own, a would-be mastermind on the lam. At first, he hopes to take refuge at the home of an old pal (John Mangaro) but the man’s wife (Gaby Hoffmann) seems to smell trouble on him and gives him the boot.
Once the hapless Mooney is alone, what I call the film’s poetic aspect emerges. That happens, in effect, as the story’s background moves into the foreground. Earlier, we have seen brief glimpses of newspaper headlines and TV reports about the Vietnam War. But as we approach the story’s end these grow more frequent and detailed, and in the final scene, Mooney finds himself engulfed in a parade of antiwar demonstrators who are besieged by police. In a sense, this isn’t a satisfying as a dramatic or narrative conclusion to the story of a man who has staged an art theft. Rather, it’s a poetic transposition that makes the film’s real story the era when the story takes place, an era of political division much like our own.
Kelly Reichardt is one of the American independent cinema’s real treasures, one whose films are always touched with cinematic poetry. “The Mastermind” benefits from the excellent work of many of her collaborators, but of special note are cinematographer Chistian Blauvelt, whose images help conjure the mood and look for the 70s, and Rob Mazurek, whose jazzy score radiates infectious energy.
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