end of tour
The End of the Tour is a talking movie. It’s a movie about two dudes on the road, crashing in hotels and stocking up on junk food while chatting about Alanis Morissette, action movies and the struggle for satisfaction amidst the overwhelming isolation of modern life.
Never mind that the people doing the talking are, to varying degrees, big-name writers. That almost doesn’t matter. This considering that the big draw of the movie is its subject, David Foster Wallace – perhaps the biggest name writer of the new millennium. The other big story is the man playing Wallace, Jason Segel (Sex Tape, How I Met Your Mother), a comedy actor who plays against type as the troubled novelist whose legend has only grown since his 2008 death.
The movie follows David Lipsky, a young Rolling Stone writer (Jesse Eisenberg (The Double), with his standard fast-talking awkward boy shtick) interviewing Wallace as he ends the book tour of his massively successful mega-novel Infinite Jest.
Still, the fact of Wallace’s literary superstardom does not seem altogether central to the movie. Wallace, here, is a character, a vehicle for interesting ideas, a human being. This is an idea movie. In the vein of My Dinner with Andre, it’s mostly about two guys chatting about existential things: identity, happiness, art, dogs. The End of the Tour is the literary bromance of the summer.
It’s not a biopic. It works as both a character study and a road trip movie, although likely with a bit more dialogue about dealing with depression and authenticity than Vacation, which also opened this past weekend.
To prepare for his role as Wallace, Segel read the substantial book Infinite Jest, a novel that clocks in at more than 1,000 pages with dozens of characters and plots. While Wallace also wrote several nonfiction books, Segel said he saw more of the real Wallace in this fictional work, noting he read it as something like an extended metaphor for the uncertainties in the author’s own life.
“To me when I read it,” Segel said in a Q&A after the screening, “it felt like an S.O.S. being sent out saying, ‘Hey, this is how I feel. I’m feeling dissatisfied. I’m feeling like what we’ve been promised since we were young – that pleasure, achievement or entertainment are going to make us happy – I don’t feel that way, does anyone else want to join in this conversation?’
It’s unclear whether this movie does get to the real Wallace. After his death, the unyielding David Foster Wallace cult has canonized his books and overtaken his identity. In this movie, audiences can get some sense of the man in his speech and his personality, even if there is little by way of his actual writing.
Segel has earned the acclaim he’s received for this role. In the best part of the movie, the actor feels achingly sincere and brings humanity to the often deified author. In some moments, in certain lighting, he even looks eerily similar to the man.
It might be impossible to ever really capture who Wallace was as a person, a fact that the fame-shy Wallace might have found some solace in, but this movie at least shows a side of him that’s too often overlooked.
Either way, this movie succeeds even without the esteem of the author it focuses on. It works as just a movie in which people talk about interesting things. Segel noted that a lot of blockbuster movies are fun distractions from life, but this is a movie less about distractions. This is a movie meant to bring people into a conversation.
“The real hope is that, like what the arthouse movie used to be like, you go out with a group of people to see the movie and make a night of it,” Segel said. “You go out and have dinner and there’s discussion to be had.”
