Venice Hidden Gem: Willem Dafoe Is a Poetic Postal Worker in ‘Late Fame’

When, unbeknownst to each other, two directors pursue the same subject at the same time, typically somebody loses. But when a director and a star just happen to be tracking the same Viennese novella from 1895, everybody wins. 

That’s what happened to director Kent Jones and Willem Dafoe. 

It was early 2024, and Jones had signed on to direct Late Fame, an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s book about an aging postal worker and onetime poet who is suddenly lionized by a group of idealistic young creatives. Jones had just attended the PGA Awards and was flying from Los Angeles back to New York, and as luck would have it, Dafoe was his seatmate. 

“He and I knew each other a bit — I had done New York Film Festival stuff with him — and we just talked for the whole time about absolutely everything but Late Fame,” Jones recalls. “And then when it got to the casting process, [he] just seemed like not just the right choice, kind of like the only choice. And it turned out that while he was on the plane, he had a copy of the novella in his backpack, which is just crazy. So he was already on the trail before he knew that there was a script.”

Jones didn’t approach anyone but Dafoe for the lead role, and a year later they were shooting the film together.

Written by Samy Burch (2023’s May December), the script transplants the action from fin de siècle Vienna to modern-day New York, where Dafoe’s Ed Saxberger has spent 37 years working at the post office, living a quiet and anonymous but not unhappy life. One day, a recent NYU grad named Meyers (Edmund Donovan) turns up at his apartment, declares Saxberger’s forgotten book of poems a work of genius and pleads with him to visit Meyers’ circle of writers and students, dubbed The Enthusiasm Society. Surrounded by well-heeled young people with heady ideas about art, Saxberger is swept up in a whirlwind of adulation and conflict — and a confusing flirtation with Gloria (Greta Lee), a talented but struggling actress.

“There are three stories that are happening simultaneously,” Jones says of Late Fame, premiering in the Orrizonte section of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival. “There’s the story of Willem’s character, there’s the story of Greta’s character, and there’s the story of the guys. And the way that they all interact and interweave and then come apart is what the movie’s all about.”

Appropriately, the backdrop for all of that drama and growth is poetry, from the film’s opening montage of poets like Anne Waldman and Ted Berrigan, to recordings of William Carlos Williams that Saxberger listens to in his apartment, to the terrible but earnest poetry of Winn (Luca Padovan), the youngest member of the Society. It’s a choice that connects the characters to the kind of art that is or was — or that they hope will be — central to their lives, taking a bitterness inherent to Schnitzler’s original satire and replacing it with heart.

“I didn’t want anybody in the movie to be just a figure of fun,” says Jones. “I was interested in people who have dreams that they buy into.”