‘The End of the Tour’ is the best movie you’ll see this summer. | ★★★★ out of 4 stars
By Kyle Smith, New York Post Aug 29, 2015 | 5:26pm
Jason Segel (right) is author David Foster Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg plays a Rolling Stone reporter in “The End of the Tour.” [A24 Films]
"What’s the best conversation you’ve ever had? 'The End of the Tour' is a five-day bender of a talk — a film that illuminates like few others the singular pleasure of shared discovery of one another’s sensibility. In an unassuming way, it’s a glory.
"I didn’t expect to be blown away by a film about a writer I didn’t much like. I found the work of David Foster Wallace (played with depth and sincerity by Jason Segel) baggy and preening. Proving you’re brilliant isn’t the point of writing.
"Yet Segel’s Wallace, accompanied on a Midwest book tour by Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), is fascinating. Self-questioning and without pretense, 'Dave' is as earthy as his (unfeigned) love of dumb blockbusters and junk food. His primary struggle is not with his art, but simply, like most of us, to be a good human being. His power to feel is too acute though, and the film is a doleful flashback from the news that he took his own life in 2008, 12 years after the interview depicted in the film.
"Without pressing that point too firmly, the multifaceted but grounded script for 'The End of the Tour,' by the Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist Donald Margulies, provides an attractively complicated portrait of Wallace: He’s a shy exhibitionist, he’s empty and aburst. He says he enjoys having dogs rather than a girlfriend around because of his fear of hurting someone’s feelings. He says his most damaging addiction is to television. He fears dating because, notes the author of the 1,079-page novel Infinite Jest, 'I wouldn’t know what to say.' He offers that one way he has gotten smarter is to realize he isn’t necessarily smarter than others.
"Wallace was spectacularly not, as he claimed to be, 'a regular guy,' and yet he wasn’t so unusual that 'The End of the Tour' is merely a celebrity profile: Margulies, and director James Ponsoldt, have fashioned a film that’s a hive of ideas. Shorn of the artifice of his books, Wallace’s thinking was soulful, compassionate, generous.
“'The End of the Tour' is darkened by and even defined by suicide — if Wallace were still alive, it wouldn’t even have been made — but in its respect for the way we bond together by sharing our thoughts, it is sweetly, excitingly alive. See it with your best friend."
Watch: 'The End of the Tour' Official Trailer
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