Late Fame review – Willem Dafoe is a natural poet in a slice-of-life New York fable

Venice film festival
A postman’s forgotten poetry collection finds new admirers in a tale of how the mystique of the past filters to the present

Ed Saxberger is an amiable, unassuming New Yorker on the cusp of old age who works at the post office and wears a pen behind one ear. In his youth, he published an anthology of poetry called Way Past Go, which caused barely a ripple and quickly slipped out of print. Then one day he is accosted outside his apartment by an NYU student, who explains that he stumbled across Way Past Go at a secondhand bookstore and was transported, blown away and could scarcely believe what he’d found. “You’re a man of letters,” the student tells Saxberger, which is undeniably true given that he spends his days sorting them.

Hitchcock once said that nine-tenths of a film’s success is in the casting, by which measure Late Fame already qualifies as a hit. Saxberger is portrayed with a loose, warm-leather ease by Willem Dafoe, who makes the man look bemused but never once makes him foolish. It’s a performance so natural it barely looks like acting at all and it keeps the film honest when the plot shows its hand and the gears start to creak. When the postal worker is introduced to his band of new disciples, the students crowd around as if inspecting a piece of living history. “Of course that’s how you’d look,” purrs Gloria (Greta Lee), the group’s flamboyant queen bee. Gloria speaks for her friends but she speaks for the rest of us, too.

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