Samy Burch’s adaptation of an Arthur Schnitzler novella sees Dafoe’s ageing poet embraced by a younger cohort of capricious hipsters. It’s smart, literate and affecting
There’s a marvellous tenderness and generosity to this elegant tale of autumnal regret; an intimate movie acted with effortless grace by Willem Dafoe. In fact, this is yet another of his almost numberless performances of intelligence and self-possession. Screenwriter Samy Burch has adapted a novella by Arthur Schnitzler, which has been directed by critic turned film-maker Kent Jones (who in 2015 made Hitchcock/Truffaut, a documentary that I very much admired). Their movie finds a new variation on the Schnitzlerian theme of life’s lost opportunities for love, lust and success, and how, as mortality’s shadow closes in, one might be tempted to risk everything for a last chance at worldly triumph.
The main character here is a distant cousin – though a wiser cousin – to the doctor in Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle or Dream Story, filmed by Kubrick as Eyes Wide Shut. Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, an old guy in New York who works in the post office, sorting mail, perhaps without the means to retire, living solo in a small but book-filled room in a humble walkup, drinking and playing pool with his buddies in the evening. One day, Saxberger is astonished to be accosted by a dandyish young hipster outside his apartment building; this is Meyers (played by Edmund Donovan), who knows something about Saxberger that nobody else does. Saxberger was once a talented young poet in the 70s New York bohemian scene and Meyers has found his long since out-of-print volume of poems, entitled Way Past Go. He declares Saxberger a neglected genius that he, and his similarly callow and excitable literary friends, are going to take up.