The End of the Tour

Great poster! Beautiful concept. The image tells us everything we'd want to know
about the film. Especially gutsy is the decision to exclude Jesse Eisenberg's and Jason Segel's faces. 

It's called a two-hander. In the theatre it connotes a play with only two actors. hink Driving Miss Daisy or most plays by Samuel Beckett. In The End of the Tour, Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg and director James Ponsoldt take the two hander into movie land, albeit with a supporting cast (including a hilarious comedic acting turn courtesy of Joan Cusack) and make it into a genuine, moving, funny, and heart-wrenching bit of cinema. 

The celebrity writer and his admirer. Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel. 

We may never know who David Foster Wallace really was. Already his estate is disowning this film - but the truth about that is also up for grabs. All we have is the film, exhibit A (if you will), and what we read about it, along with Mr. Wallace's writings and David Lipsky's Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Maybe it doesn't matter whether the film is factually accurate or not. Maybe what matters is that the film's emotional truth be accurate. Of course we can't know if that too is accurate or not, but I'm certainly convinced it comes damned close and should certainly get high marks for trying to capture who the man was. 

David Foster Wallace at home with one of his two large dogs. 

The End of the Tour follows reporter Lipsky and author Wallace on a five day journey from Wallace's home in Illinois to a book signing in Minneapolis and back. Lipsky, played with dogged determination by the great Jesse Eisenberg, wants Rolling Stone to publish a profile of America's greatest living author, David Foster Wallace, played (well, played is the wrong word here, more on that later) by Jason Segel. If you've ever had to meet someone you admire, and meet them under difficult circumstances, and they were a remote person to begin with, you'll get what the first part of the film is about. Lipsky's first meeting with Wallace provides us with a textbook example of how it might go. Two men circling around one another, taking each other in from a distance, avoiding excessive eye contact. Director Ponsoldt's camera keeps both men at a distance. We, the audience, have the same hard time pegging Wallace as Lipsky did. He moves away, changes the subject, avoids too much conversation - until Lipsky manages to corner him, like a lawyer cross examining a reluctant witness. 

Conflict in a film can be "merely" verbal. It doesn't have to be violent or physical. We're attracted to these two characters
as they circle around each other, looking for a way to connect, hitting psychological walls, falling, getting up, trying again.

In America, the quest for fame and recognition along with adoration from the media is by now a cliche. We didn't come up with the term "rags to riches" by accident. It's everyone's classic fantasy. Well, anyone that aspires to any kind of celebrity status, be it in the world of business, art, or in this case - literature. As portrayed in this film, Wallace is most certainly a reluctant celebrity, hoping against hope that this latest book tour won't perturb his isolated, comfy existence. Writers are loners, but not necessarily by choice. And this is where the actor playing Wallace, Jason Segel, doesn't appear so much to "act" the role as much as he appears to shrug off any attempt to. I haven't seen behavior this natural, this normal, in a film for a long time. Segel doesn't seem to be there, nor do we ever get the sense that the person we're looking at is aware there's a film crew present and a camera pointed at him - in close up no less.  It's an Oscar-worthy performance and brings to mind a sentence written by the great David Foster Wallace himself in his book of essays A Supposedly Funny Thing I'll Never Do Again. Here it is:

Make no mistake - seeming unwatched in front of a [TV] camera is an art. Take a look at how non-professionals act when a [TV] camera is pointed at them ; they often spaz out, or else they go all stiff, frozen with self-consciousness.

Could it be that Jason Segel has also read these lines and mastered the art of conveying being unwatched while the camera is rolling? It wouldn't surprise me. What I'm getting at is that Wallace's real life reluctance at becoming a celebrity, his self-effacing nature, fits hand in glove with Segel's apparent non-acting (which of course it isn't), which appears to align with Wallace's sentences (see above). 

Using their celebrity status to promote a wonderful film about reluctant celebrities.

It takes a special kind of person to withdraw just when the world comes knocking at their door. There's something wonderful about not chasing fame. We want to love someone who is so unselfish. And we do. Our empathy for Wallace's desire to have a normal life is what makes this character study so appealing. Wallace just doesn't want to get sucked into the celebrity-making machinery only to find himself no longer writing and on the talk show circuit. What his reluctance is also masking, however, is his depression and - eventually - as we all know now - his suicide. So while we can love a man who recognizes the sham of the machinery and knows how to sidestep it, we also know that in that maneuver lie the symptoms of an unhappy soul who - in the end - found it hard to engage. Could Wallace have struck a balance between fame and preserving his privacy? At the time of his death he'd been living with a woman, always a good first step. But we'll never know for sure. 

Still, The End of the Tour is so very generous in its offerings. The film has an unlikely but highly entertaining buddies on the road quality. For every question Lipsky poses, Wallance counters with not just an answer but a comment on the nature of interviewing. Like Wallace's writings, the film is also meta and has a wonderfully post-modern anti-narrative feel to it. The risk with two handers is claustrophobia; navel-gazing. Too much time spent with too few people. In this film that somehow is avoided, and I think the reason is that these two guys are simply too different and - consequently - there's enough conflict, enough back and forth - peppered with enough pauses - to keep it interesting. And, after a couple of hours happily stuck with these two wonderful (warts and all) people, Ponsoldt takes us out for a walk with them onto a frozen lake, letting us (and the characters) out of the intellectual cage/game they've (we've) been playing in. Like a great Fellini film whose closing shots often take place by the seashore, Wallace's frozen lake works as a beautiful metaphor for his own delicate, all too human, frozen psyche, his vulnerability, his suffering and, ultimately, his tragic end. 

The film's closing walk by the lake takes us out of the intellectual/emotional cage we've willingly spent two hours inside.