Like most films by Hong Sang-soo, WHAT DOES THAT NATURE SAY TO YOU appears to be about not much at all, but in truth is about quite a bit. Behind all the dialogue delivered in a halting, overly formal manner, there are depths of feeling, with the deadpan awkwardness hinting at greater conflicts, both within and between the characters. Then, when the direct emotions do erupt, those moments bring relief, surprise, perhaps catharsis. In contrast, Kent Jones’s LATE FAME attempts to be about a number of important themes and topics (class, art, love, aging) yet turns out to be about not much at all—or at least says very little that’s new about those themes and topics. We almost don’t care, though. There have been so many individual pleasures along the way—lots of sharp humor, an affectionate and nicely detailed evocation of NYC, Dafoe completely at home in a role and working his quiet magic—that the disappointing emptiness of the overall story may not register immediately. We’ve seen all these tropes of disillusionment in other dramedies, right down to the mundane truth behind the muse-like character played by a vamping Greta Lee (near the end we’re given a reveal whose contours we can see from about fifty script pages out).
Both films center poetry, LATE FAME more overtly. And both, interestingly, do not concern themselves with the artistic process per se or how it’s integrated with the day-to-day demands of life—that is, you won’t mistake either for Jim Jarmusch’s excellent PATERSON. Instead, each film explores what the identity of “being a poet” means, both to the poet and society more generally. To employ a somewhat reductionist East/West dichotomy, in WHAT DOES THAT NATURE SAY TO YOU, poetry is in reach for all, a commonplace occurrence that functions as a natural extension of observing and reflecting upon the everyday; in LATE FAME, however, and as the title would suggest, literary success in its various forms is the name of the game—even when most of the poets are loudly trumpeting their own iconoclastic ways. This fundamental difference in the two films’ cultural and critical approach to poetry becomes stark in the respective scenes of public recital. One takes place around a dinner table to an audience of four; the other is conceived as a grand spectacle, an almost revolutionary act. Both scenes, and both films, explore this idea of performing a text with thought and care. However, LATE FAME fumbles because to a large extent it saddles itself with buying into the characters’ hype: a poetry reading portrayed as a highly dramatic affair must by necessity feature some degree of drama, even if it’s of the moldy backstage variety. The writing loses the viewer because it’s stacking the deck and making all its points in unbearably obvious and “entertaining” ways. Similarly, the entire premise of twenty-something New York poets behaving without exception like pretentious fourteen-year-olds relies on a contrived, if amusing, caricature that won’t be recognizable to any real-life New Yorkers or poets. In this way, LATE FAME comes across as a satire that’s satirizing something that doesn’t really exist.
When the moment of truth arrives in both films—we hear, at long last, the actual work of the poet-protagonist—it’s neither astonishingly brilliant nor embarrassingly bad. It’s okay. It’s fine. The key difference, though, is that LATE FAME has spent the entire movie building up the supposed greatness of the poetry itself, and the characters continue to lavish praise on it afterwards. The effect is rather like that of the crowning standup routine in the Tom Hanks vehicle PUNCHLINE—we’ve waited all this time and danced all around the thing itself, but in the end the mid-range quality of the thing itself is a bit anticlimactic. To be fair, perhaps that’s what Jones is shooting for: the audience finally learns, simultaneously, why Dafoe is a big deal to these kids and yet not to the wider world, including himself. If so, the point is so subtle that it verges on the ambiguous. Still, credit to both filmmakers on insisting on the value of art while showing that its creation, and enjoyment, are far from intrinsically ennobling. It’s a point that few artists dare make, and fewer audiences want to hear.
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