Jesse Eisenberg (left) is wonderfully wretched as a journalist interviewing a likeable David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel).
You may remember this Onion article: “Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn’t Own a Television.” It’s about a guy who considers himself too smart to ever watch TV. No one would question David Foster Wallace’s intelligence, but watching The End of the Tour, I was sobered by what the character based on him says about why he doesn’t own a television: He would never stop watching it.
True, I was primed to be sobered. Wallace’s 2008 suicide was a shock, and mortality haunts this very fine, intermittently funny drama drawn from author and journalist David Lipsky’s 1996 interviews with the acclaimed novelist. At one point Wallace (Jason Segel) describes some dire potential outcome and concludes: “I’d rather be dead.” Gulp.
Lipsky interviewed Wallace for Rolling Stone as Wallace promoted Infinite Jest, the book that established him as a literary sensation. The piece never ran, but the interview transcripts were published in Lipsky’s 2010 book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.
The End of the Tour has a stagey quality, which makes sense because the source material is dialogue. The bulk of the film is a series of conversations between Wallace and Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), who visits Wallace at his home in Illinois and travels with him to Minneapolis for a reading. Over the course of the film, the dynamic shifts. The interaction starts on a sour note, then gets friendly as the men settle into their roles. Wallace tries to maintain boundaries. He doesn’t want to discuss his love life, and he doesn’t want Lipsky to talk to his parents. Eventually there is a fierce misunderstanding, and relations get testy.
Story-wise, that’s pretty much it. There aren’t many details about Infinite Jest, so if you want to learn more you’ll just have to read it — all 1,079 pages of it. The End of the Tour is most importantly a character study of Wallace, who inspired a following as obsessive as Pynchon’s. Watching Segel, who starred in the long-running sitcom How I Met Your Mother, I thought of Pauline Kael’s zinger about Alan Alda: “There is a price to be paid for being likable in a TV series week after week, year after year.” Segel’s performance is memorable, and one reason it succeeds is its very likability. In this portrayal, Wallace is a genius who’s uncomfortable with his genius, who projects a normal-guy image with his dumpy clothes, smokeless tobacco and prosaic taste in movies.
Also uncomfortable with Wallace’s genius: Lipsky. “Not everyone can be as brilliant as you,” he snaps at one point. Eisenberg strikes familiar acting notes with this performance, whose unsmiling intensity recalls the actor’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. Lipsky wields his tape recorder like a weapon and crosses ethical lines, as when he secretly scribbles down the contents of Wallace’s medicine cabinet. Lipsky envies Wallace’s talent and seemingly effortless success, as Salieri does Mozart’s in Amadeus. Envy is a wretched quality, and few actors do wretched better than Eisenberg.