Early in James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour, journalist and first-time novelist David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) gives a reasonably well attended talk at a book store. When he gets home, he discovers a rapturous review of another book, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. He starts reading the review out loud to his girlfriend (a woefully underused Anna Chlumsky), in a mocking kind of voice. She notes, teasingly, that maybe Wallace actually deserves such praise.
Cut to: Lipsky reading the book and muttering under his breath, “Shit.”
So Lipsky goes to Rolling Stone magazine, where he freelances, and asks to do a profile of Wallace (Jason Segel), who has become something of a literary rockstar, complete with rumors of past heroin addiction. Rolling Stone agrees and Lipsky drives out to Massachusetts to meet the semi-reclusive novelist. He’ll accompany him on his final tour stop, in Minneapolis.
And with that, the film, written by Donald Margulies and based on Lipsky’s book, has deftly set up the relationship between our two protagonists. Lipsky wants fame and greatness and is jealous of others who have achieved it. Wallace simply is great. Lipsky is also smart enough himself to recognize genius in others. He’s Salieri to Wallace’s Mozart,
There’s been much discussion of whether or not Segel truly captures Wallace—who committed suicide in 2008—or if there’s something inherently patronizing about the film’s depiction of him as a genius naïf who was too pure for this world. I can’t speak to its veracity, but I loved Segel’s work here, playing Wallace as someone who over-analyzed everything, to a compulsive, near paralyzing degree, while still managing to be the most interesting, literary guy in the room. Segel doesn’t really look much like Wallace—Wallace had a fuller face, a stronger jaw—but he’s a hulking, tall man and that was also true of Wallace, a cruel trick of fate for someone who often craved invisibility.
Getting back to that Mozart-Salieri comparison: The film suggests that Wallace wasn’t chasing fame, or trying to be a literary wunderkind of any sort. He wrote because he had to, and then was abashed, mortified even, by the success that followed (and, yes, the fact that a part of him loved that success). Lipsky explicitly craved the things that Wallace stumbled into.
I didn’t expect to be quite as moved by Segel’s performance as I was. He somehow managed to capture both Wallace’s unparalleled intellect and his constant yearning—to be understood, to make sense of this screwed up world, even to understand himself. He showed that Wallace raged, hard, against his own demons but they often got the best of him. I found myself tearing up, several times, just because of the pain in Segel’s voice.
Eisenberg is not quite as successful. He’s a fine actor—and he seems fully engaged here; always listening and thinking as any real journalist would—but he tends to come across as a bit of a precocious twerp. This worked perfectly, of course, in The Social Network —where he played the ultimate precocious twerp. But here it’s a bit more problematic. “You agreed to this interview,” he petulantly reminds Wallace, whenever the author is reticent to discuss something personal. Later, he accuses Wallace of playing dumb, holding back his intellect. (That’s really a reflection of Lipsky’s own projections, the way he thinks a genius should behave). The two men are jealous of each other—Wallace craves Lipsky’s normalcy, the quietude of his mind. Lipsky is blatantly envious of Wallace’s success. Of course, that dynamic is written right into the script. But I think we’re supposed to be on Lipsky’s side, see him as a surrogate for us, whereas more than once, I thought, “Grow up, do your job, and get over yourself, buddy.” That, I think, is on Eisenberg.
Still, The End of the Tour is powerful stuff. Ponsoldt gives us a wonderful sense of Wallace’s depressingly cluttered and isolated home and the surreal tedium of a writer’s life on the road (at one point, Lipsky and Wallace end up at The Mall of America). He also gets to Wallace’s inherent decency without romanticizing it (too much).
I’ve always admired films that pull off the sleight of hand of keeping us engaged in what is, essentially, one long conversation. There are a few other characters who drift in and out here—Joan Cusack plays a Minneapolis tour guide; Mamie Gummer and Mickey Sumner are two old friends of Wallace’s—but mostly it’s just the two men, talking about writing, about success, about depression, about women, about life. I could’ve listened in for hours.