Jagged little pill

Our quest for endless entertainment was David Foster Wallace’s main literary theme, but the flipside of that was a quest for real human connection.

There’s a special problem with  depicting real-life writers on the big screen. Often, they have such a specific public image — think Ernest Hemingway, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson — that it becomes impossible to capture them through an actor’s impersonation. The real writer already seems larger than life. (The same may be true for Steve Jobs, whose Danny Boyle-directed incarnation fell short at the box office.)

So when David Foster Wallace got the biopic treatment in a movie based on a series of conversations with Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky, I felt my hackles raise (I have particularly sensitive hackles); then I found out Jason Segel — of How I Met Your Mother fame — would be cast as the writer many believed was the voice of his generation. Double negative. Jesse Eisenberg was also onboard as the hero-worshipping Lipsky, which felt like strike three.

But it turns out The End of the Tour, James Ponsoldt’s road trip meditation on fame and its pitfalls, is actually faithful to the Lipsky book (Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself), and that’s part of what makes it watchable for 106 minutes.

Wallace, author of Infinite Jest and kilometric nonfiction pieces, had early on staked his claim as a “maximalist” — recording every thought and detail in his far-ranging midst while other writers had retreated into numbed-out irony. He committed suicide in 2008, and this fact hangs over The End of the Tour, becoming more poignant towards the end of the movie.

Playwright Donald Margulies (Time Stands Still) wrote up the screenplay, and where it shines is in the unexpected back-and-forth between an ambitious Rolling Stone journalist (and less-successful fictionist) who suddenly feels intimidated by the vacuum of fame surrounding Wallace.

Physically, Segel succeeds in capturing the writer’s bear-like presence, though in real life (heard in countless interviews) Wallace’s voice and features were much softer. He does get the bandanna right, though.

Again, this is a problem with depicting writers who carry a specific image: Wallace had his physical quirks — things like chewing tobacco and wearing a bandana, which he dreaded people would see as “affectations” — and these things were easy for people to latch onto as his “image.” Infinite Jest was published in 1996 amid a heap of literary pre-hype, which put the shy, prone-to-depression Wallace at a distinct disadvantage. He liked the validation, but rather squirmed under the microscopic attention. Plus, it all seemed to put nonstop pressure on the novelist to deliver a follow-up.

Lipsky (Eisenberg) meets up with Wallace in the outskirts of Bloomington, Illinois sometime that year, during the wintry final days of his Infinite Jest book tour. Wallace lives in a professor’s squat, in relative squalor with his two dogs. There’s a poster of Alanis Morissette — whose fame was hottest then — on the wall. This leads to ruminations on fame. Lipsky and Wallace analyze why Morissette’s imperfect voice is so appealing in a way that a more glamorous singer’s wouldn’t be, and Lipsky coaxes the novelist to call her up and set a date.

That’s when Wallace starts to get wary; he accuses Lipsky of looking for things to make him look stupid in Rolling Stone. It becomes the dynamic of the entire movie.

Indeed, The End of the Tour seems, on the surface, much more concerned about the price of fame than it does Wallace’s work or “message.” There’s little discussion of the writing process, or what Wallace plans to tackle next. Rather, there are pop cultural parries about what kind of movie to watch in Minneapolis after the book signing is over (both Wallace and Lipsky choose John Woo’s Broken Arrow, while their “dates” prefer an Oscar-bait drama); there are many discussions about junk food and Wallace’s consumptive habits, up to and including way too much television. Even back in 1996, Wallace was predicting how the Internet would become all-pervasive, an inescapable entertainment portal, much as he foresaw in Infinite Jest.

So as the Internet grows in the next 10, 15 years, we’re gonna have to develop some real machinery inside our guts to turn off pure, unalloyed pleasure. Or, I don’t know about you, I’m gonna have to leave the planet. ‘Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better. And it’s gonna get easier, and more convenient, and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that’s fine in low doses, but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die.

Our quest for endless entertainment was Wallace’s main literary theme, but the flipside of that was a quest for real human connection, a shot at total communication that he felt, at its best, writing could summon.

The movie does not lack for communication. In fact, in terms of talkiness, it makes Before Sunrise look like an action movie. And there are some real gem conversations here.

But in the interest of drama, Lipsky and Wallace have to develop a love-hate dynamic. They hit the worst patch when the journalist gets around to asking the novelist about his rumored heroin use, which Wallace denies. (Though a savvier journalist might have followed up by asking about all the “Twelve Step” material in Infinite Jest.)

The End of the Tour ends as Lipsky’s book does: the Rolling Stone scribe sneaking around Wallace’s house, taking down random details to “color” his piece; and with a shot of Wallace, incongruously dancing with abandon at a local church. The funny thing is, the profile never did run in Rolling Stone (Lipsky’s book came out in 2010, after Wallace’s death). This movie offers yet another fractional portrait of a writer concerned with the smallest minutiae of our existence, and how it could all be preserved.