{"id":4790,"date":"2015-08-31T06:42:09","date_gmt":"2015-08-31T10:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4790"},"modified":"2015-09-25T06:59:25","modified_gmt":"2015-09-25T10:59:25","slug":"the-end-of-the-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4790","title":{"rendered":"The End of the Tour"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"End

Jesse Eisenberg & Jason Segel<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1996 David Foster Wallace\u2019s 1079-page novel Infinite Jest<\/em> hit the literary scene like a rocket. The publisher\u2019s marketing efforts meant the book was everywhere, but the man himself\u2014shy, full of self-doubt, not wanting to be trapped into any literary poseur moments and seeing them as inevitable\u2014was difficult to read. This movie (trailer<\/a>) uses a tyro journalist\u2019s eye to probe Wallace during an intense five days of interviewing toward the end of the Infinite Jest<\/em> book tour.<\/p>\n

As a tryout writer for Rolling Stone<\/em>, reporter David Lipsky had begged for the assignment to write a profile of Wallace, which ultimately the magazine never published. But the tapes survived, and after Wallace\u2019s suicide in 2008 they became the basis for Lipsky\u2019s 2010 book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself<\/em>, which fed David Margulies screenplay. The plot of the movie is minimal; instead, it\u2019s a deep exploration of character. It may just be two guys talking, but I found it tectonic.<\/p>\n

Director James Ponsoldt has brought nuanced, intelligent performances from his two main actors\u2014Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as reporter David Lipsky. Lipsky is a novelist himself, with a so-so book to his credit. Wallace has reached the heights, and what would it take for Lipsky to scramble up there too? Jealousy and admiration are at war within him and, confronted with Wallace\u2019s occasional oddness<\/em>, one manifestation of which is the attempt to be Super-Regular Guy\u2014owning dogs, eating junk food, obsessively watching television\u2014he isn\u2019t sure what to feel. You see it on his face.<\/p>\n

Is Lipsky friend or foe? He\u2019s not above snooping around Wallace\u2019s house or chatting up his friends to nail his story. Lipsky rightly makes Wallace nervous, the tape recorder makes him nervous; he amuses, he evades, he delivers a punch of a line, he feints. When the going gets too rough, Lipsky falls back on saying, \u201cYou agreed to the interview,\u201d and Wallace climbs back in the saddle, as if saying to himself, just finish this awful ride, then back to the peace and solitude necessary actually to write. In the meantime, he is, as A. O. Scott said in his New York Times<\/em> review<\/a>, \u201cplaying the role of a writer in someone else\u2019s fantasy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The movie\u2019s opening scene delivers the fact of the suicide, which by design looms over all that follows, in the long flashback to a dozen years earlier and the failed interview. You can\u2019t help but interpret every statement of Wallace\u2019s through that lens. The depression is clear. He\u2019s been treated for it and for alcoholism, from which he seems to have recovered. The two Davids walk on the snow-covered farm fields of Wallace\u2019s Illinois home and talk about how beautiful it is, but it is bleak, and even in as jam-packed an environment as the Mall of America Wallace\u2019s conversation focuses on the emptiness at the heart of life. Yet his gentle humor infuses almost every exchange, and Lipsky can be wickedly funny too.<\/p>\n

Wallace can\u2019t help but feel great ambivalence toward Lipsky; he recognizes Lipsky\u2019s envy and his hero-worship, and both are troubling. He felt a truth inside himself, but he finds it almost impossible to capture and isn\u2019t sure he has, saying, \u201cThe more people think you\u2019re really great, the bigger your fear of being a fraud is.\u201d Infinite Jest<\/em> was a widely praised literary success, but not to Wallace himself.<\/p>\n

Rotten Tomatoes<\/a> critics rating: 92%, audiences, 89%.<\/p>\n

\"farm,

(photo: M Pincus, creative commons license)<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1996 David Foster Wallace\u2019s 1079-page novel Infinite Jest hit the literary scene like a rocket. The publisher\u2019s marketing efforts meant the book was everywhere, but the man himself\u2014shy, full of self-doubt, not wanting to be trapped into any literary … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The End of the Tour - conversation absolutely worth listening to","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[62,265,366,57,104],"tags":[425,416,28],"class_list":["post-4790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-biography","category-drama","category-movies","category-the-morgue","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-real-life","tag-writers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1fg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4790"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4792,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4790\/revisions\/4792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}