The End of the Tour

The End of the Tour is the kind of film that may keep you sitting and staring long after the credits roll—not because the movie was so thrilling, or the message so deep, but because you feel physically pressed down by the weight of the subject.

Tour is a biopic of novelist David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008 at age 46, but the movie focuses on a few days of his life in 1996. Wallace (Jason Segel in a performance generating Oscar buzz), then 34, had just released his second novel, Infinite Jest, a dystopian, postmodern epic that drew critical praise bordering on hyperbole. He’s agreed to a profile interview with David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), a 30-year-old probationary hire for Rolling Stone who had also just published his own novel, The Art Fair, which warmed some seats during book readings but never attracted the raving crowds that Wallace’s did.

For a movie that’s 105 minutes long, there’s a whole lot of cigarette-puffing pontification and not a lot of action. The entire plot is about the two Davids traveling together to Minneapolis for the last stop on Wallace’s book tour—and during late-night munchies on Red Vines and Diet Pepsi, Wallace reveals his worldview. He talks about depression and suicide, fame and ego, marriage and sex. He describes the heroin high of public attention—and the emptiness and loneliness of it all.

All the while, Lipsky plays the responsive reporter with his tape recorder and notepad, at times interjecting with passive-aggressive comments on Wallace’s success or grenade-bomb questions to push Wallace to react with something quotable. Wallace is aware of Lipsky’s ploys to scavenge ratings-driving revelations: “I don’t even know if I like you,” he blurts out on their first night, “Yet I’m so nervous about whether you’ll like me.” Ever paranoid about being portrayed as a “fraud,” he frets that the Rolling Stone piece will paint him as a publicity “whore” milking his fleeting moments of stardom.

One thing the movie does well is to allow their conversations, which are based on real-life recordings, to tangle and flow naturally without any discernible narrative structure. The two Davids’ interaction feels authentic and unscripted with all their awkward silences, meandering topics, lame jokes, and crude language (hence the R rating). But of course, this is no typical chitchat between two regular guys; there’s a complex, fascinating dynamic at play between the nation’s most celebrated writer and an interviewer who both worships and resents his subject’s brilliance. As much as Lipsky laps up Wallace’s existentialist musings, he’s also envious and irritated that he didn’t come up with those sayings himself.

But really, nothing Wallace—or any of the other hyper-self-aware philosophers out there—said is new or original or even particularly deep, though not for the lack of groping for deeper truths. We live in a culture that perfected the art of navel-gazing: Pop culture and Disney preach the importance of “staying true” to yourself; “spiritual” movements encourage baseless “self-love” and “self-acceptance”; self-help and therapy books coach us on “self-identity” and “self-purpose.” Wallace was extraordinary up to the fact that he knelt long and hard enough before the shrine of self, and realized he didn’t like what he saw.

One night after Lipsky accuses the famous writer of hiding behind a Midwest “down-to-earth” persona while patronizing his intellectual inferiors, Wallace gives a prophetic soliloquy about the emptiness in his soul: “It’s feeling as if it’s all nothing. You are nothing. And feeling as if you’re better than everybody because you see this, but feeling as if you’re worse than everybody because you can’t function. It’s really horrible.” A person doesn’t commit suicide because he wants to die, Wallace tells Lipsky. He does it because he’s running away from something more horrible than death.

The End of the Tour is not an uplifting story, nor is it really even a story about Wallace. It poses worthy thoughts and questions, but without freedom from answers found in the gospel, those ideas only bind and oppress.