The idea of being rediscovered is an attractive one for any artist who’s been ignored or forgotten. Usually, it happens after they’re dead, so it does them no good and the rediscoverers can make them into saints or devils and to write their legends anyway they see fit. But what if the neglected genius is still kicking?
That’s the subject of Kent Jones’ beautiful little movie. Screenwriter Samy Burch (who wrote Todd Haines’ vicious May December) changes Arthur Schnitzler’s late-19th century Vienna to present-day NYC but I think this story would work in any period or culture. It’s about receiving an unexpected gift, then realizing you don’t want or even need it. That gap between what we imagine and its reality is one of the most commonplace human conundrums.
Ed (Willem Dafoe, beautifully underplaying) is an aging postal employee with a comfortable, decades-old routine: he goes to work, goes to the neighborhood bar, eats his humble meals, and ignores increasingly desperate calls from his sister-in-law about his estranged brother’s imminent demise. One night he finds a dandyish young man outside his door. The young man has discovered the poetry collection Ed published fifty years back and wants to invite him to be feted by his group of aspiring aesthetes. Ed hesitates but is eventually bullied into joining them by the young man’s dogged persistence.
We’re never told why Ed gave up on poetry but his apartment full of books indicates that even if he has not written a sentence in decades that literature has not entirely let him alone. The band of eager young acolytes lights a flame in Ed. No one in his life knows he was once a writer but his new friends treat him as a neglected genius. He doesn’t completely buy it but is not untouched by the unexpected attention. He starts wearing a scarf, earning some teasing from his old drinking buddies, and buys a pack of American Spirits at his corner bodega after asking the clerk what artsy young people smoke.
But the bloom comes off this new rose quickly. The class differences between Ed and the young people make it impossible for either side to truly see the other. They idolize what they take to be his “authenticity” and champion him as an antidote to the skin-deep culture of influencers and fad-chasers they claim to loathe, but, in the end, it’s clear most have not even taken the time to read Ed’s collection of poetry. To Ed, these aspiring artists represent freshness and hope, yet one by one, each one’s mask falls to reveal a far less romantic or idealistic reality. Rather than the next Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood or Bloomsbury Group, this is just a bunch of aimless trustafarians desperate to latch onto anything at all that might give their day-to-day some meaning.
The understated ending is neither tragic nor comic, but just the right size and shape for this little story. K said after we left the theater that it gave her a new fear of being “discovered” by pretentious writerly types but I say, bring it on. I’ll take whatever kind of misguided, misinformed attention I can get!
There’s a dedication at the end to poet Peter Gizzi who I read with at a house show in Western Massachusetts a couple years ago. Thought maybe it meant he died but it seems he’s still kicking.
Very happy to share the preorder link for Mike Reed’s new record with my collage on the cover. Proud to be associated with this music.
