Willem Dafoe’s Late Fame has moved from festival curiosity to the start of its theatrical life. The film, which premiered a year ago at the Venice Film Festival, is now beginning theatrical engagements with Dafoe as Ed Saxberger, a former poet and postal worker whose past comes back into view.
That is the reason the title is drawing fresh attention today: the film is no longer just a Venice premiere but a release people can actually go see. Greta Lee co-stars as Gloria, and Kent Jones directs from a screenplay by Samy Burch, who modernized Arthur Schnitzler’s 1890’s novella by shifting the story from Vienna to New York City’s Soho district.
Dafoe’s character gives the film its center of gravity. Ed Saxberger worked for the post office for 37 years, once had a brief dance with notoriety in the late ’70s and saw his modest paperback pushed to the back shelves of a dusty private bookstore. The story turns on what happens when that forgotten life is pulled back into the light.
In the film, a young group of men called the Enthusiasm Society decides Saxberger is exactly the kind of artist they have been looking for. They reject technology in favor of art and poetry, treat him as a genius, and plan a show advertised as new poetry from a lost genius. Gloria agrees to perform his work at that event, and the invitation gives Saxberger a second chance at recognition he did not ask for.
But the film does not let the fantasy stay simple. Saxberger is skeptical that the group understands who he really is or what his poetry is really about, and that doubt gives the story its bite. The Society wants a legend; Saxberger is a man who spent 37 years at the post office and built a quiet life in a humble apartment, known more for what he became than for what he once wrote.
Late Fame is about discovery and rediscovery, but its theatrical rollout is the immediate news. The Venice premiere gave the film its first public life a year ago; now audiences are getting their first real chance to meet Dafoe’s performance in theaters. What remains unclear is how far that run will spread beyond these initial engagements, and whether the film’s slow-burn story of art and recognition can build the same kind of attention outside the festival circuit.
