An early scene in James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour depicts the first meeting between Jesse Eisenberg’s reporter Dave Lipsky and Jason Segel’s David Foster Wallace. Eisenberg awkwardly tries to break ice by commenting on the home and property, to which Wallace responds, “I can’t take credit for the view.”
One thing that both lovers and haters of The End of the Tour have in common is a love of David Foster Wallace. Lovers of the film praised the intimacy of the script and the authenticity of Jason Segel’s career-changing performance. Negative responses to the film have taken issue with the Hollywood biopic format, considering it unfaithful to the anti-commercialist spirit of the author’s oeuvre.
Both these responses come from a place of assumed personal knowledge of the author himself; we feel like we know DFW, to the extent that we feel entitled to declare whether or not a project like The End of the Tour is faithful to his essence. A more fair way to interpret Ponsoldt’s film may instead be to look at is as an anti-biopic. The film is less interested in utter and complete faithfulness to an elusive celebrity, than it is an examination of the limitations of media in aiding our attempts to know another human being.
The plot of Tour takes place over a five-day stretch, during which time Rolling Stone reporter Dave Lipsky joins David Foster Wallace for an interview while DFW is touring to promote the blockbuster novel Infinite Jest. The film mostly consists of dialogue between the two men as they discuss the toxic nature of celebrity, American culture, and other topics pertaining to Wallace’s work and supposed literary genius.
In terms of a genre, the film is difficult to categorize. Not quite a biopic, Tour at times feels like a romantic comedy-drama. The first few meetings between Wallace and Lipsky rely heavily on stress-induced chain smoking and timid bickering over who will foot the bill for dinner. In particular, the dinner scene involves a wonderful moment where Wallace asks Lipsky “if you’re as nervous as I am, because I’m fucking terrified.” The first-date awkwardness at the men’s first meeting is tangible, and both Eisenberg and Segel play off the characters’ discomfort expertly. The audience feels as uncomfortable in the artificiality of the Rolling Stone project as Wallace and (to an extent) Lipsky do.
In keeping with the title of Lipsky’s book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, of course, the two men do end up getting to know each other—and Ponsoldt refuses to sugar coat the ugly aspects of either figure’s personality. There is a consistent thematic undertone of the film that suggests an awareness of the toxic masculinity of Wallace’s work, and does not shy away from the streak of jealousy and competitiveness between the two men as authors and as, well, men.
The third act spirals into a delightfully meat-headed competition over the attention of any and every female fan, friend, and girlfriend Lipsky and Wallace encounter. Eisenberg and Segel shine in this particular tangent, both playing against type with Eisenberg sinking into a sleazy and effortless lit-bro ladies’ man and Segel struggling to keep up as the less confident beta male. The fact that their relationship finds its tipping point in a tiff over women’s attention is an especially humbling moment of ugliness and animalistic stupidity on both sides that humanizes Wallace and prevents him from being idolized by the film.
In typical rom-com style, the final act involves a ballistic shouting match, reconciliation, and resolution that suggests the two might continue on as friends and colleagues. But Lipsky leaves us with an ambiguous picture of Wallace: the only thing in closing that we know about Wallace is that we know less about him than we did at the beginning.
And so we return to the view from Wallace’s kitchen that Lipsky innocuously commented on in one of the first scenes. In its first appearance, the view was confined to a tiny box-like window, and Lipsky’s comment rang as distinctly fake. In one of the final scenes, after spending several testosterone-charged days in each other’s company, Wallace and Lipsky walk out onto Wallace’s property—and exit the confinement of the frame, so to speak. The expansive landscape shot, after a film confined to limited spaces in cars, planes, and hotel rooms, is undeniably beautiful. The End of the Tour may not complete the picture of Wallace some viewers may be looking for, but it absolutely widens the view.
To me as a reader, this is what Wallace’s project was all about—to present life’s banality and ugliness in a light that allows you to see its beauty. His project was never about knowing him as the writer.
The quest to know one’s heroes through media—be it a feature interview or a Hollywood film, is by its nature disingenuous. On several occasions Segel’s Wallace nervously suggests the impossibility of success in such an interview and, to his credit, Rolling Stone never published Lipsky’s interview. Lipsky’s quest to summarize Wallace in a confined format ultimately failed. Some might also argue that Ponsoldt’s project itself was a similar failure. But if we consider the film a complication of the man rather than a concrete resolution on his character, it is more successful in its faith to the author’s project than anything else could have been.
