It’s fair to say that no film critic wants to assess David Foster Wallace, who died by suicide in 2008. Indeed, his books are so complex and his shadow so long that few literary critics dare to try. Better to take the limited approach of the recently released film, “The End of the Tour,” based on journalist David Lipsky’s five-day interview with Wallace in 1996, following the publication of “Infinite Jest.”
What does that book mean? The jealous writer Lipsky — played by Jesse Eisenberg in this road movie — is too smart to venture a guess; or rather, he doesn’t want to risk looking foolish by guessing wrong.
Sitting in a Seattle hotel bar last month, Jason Segel (cast as Wallace) and I consider Wallace as a movie character. We’re not talking so much about the actual man as about a guarded Midwestern soul facing a pesky New York interrogator trying to peck away at the facade of presumed genius.
Even with the Internet relatively new, Wallace is already very protective of his privacy at the movie’s outset in wintry Indiana. Says Segel, “I think that his relation to technology specifically is really interesting, because he could see that these things that are meant to connect us are going to dehumanize things.”
In “Infinite Jest,” Segel cites a prescient passage about video chatting — much like Skype or iChat today. “Everybody is so excited, and then they are confronted with the reality that they could no longer do other things while you had a phone call, because now they could see their face. People could no longer clip their nails or make their dinner. And so people make dioramas of their living rooms with little action figures of themselves looking into the camera to fake attention. And it ends with them putting a piece of tape over the camera and going back to normal phone conversations. And that is a parody of what actually happened. There were a lot of things like that … that ended up being dead-on.”
The mass-mediated image has a terrible allure for Wallace, a TV junkie who can’t allow a set in his home. “I think it’s like any addiction,” says Segel. “I think it’s relief. I think it serves the same function that touching the doorknob does for someone with OCD. I think it’s a form of checking out.”
Is a little escape-from-self a bad thing?
“Well, it’s the dosage,” replies Segel. “I don’t see the problem with people having a few beers on Saturday night, but …” He lets the thought trail off, since Lipsky in the movie is investigating rumors of Wallace’s heroin and alcohol abuse — all the stereotypical trappings of the tortured-genius story template that Lipsky may or may not be writing (a template Wallace despises for being cliché).
Wallace in ’96 is becoming a celebrity who knows the danger of being stereotyped by his popular image. People like Lipsky, and his readers, are beginning to treat him with awe. There’s a distancing effect that Segel can relate to today.
“When people come up and say, ‘Can I take a picture with you?’ my thing is, in today’s world, I don’t know where that picture is going,” Segel says. “So I offer what I think is a better alternative. I say, ‘I’d rather not take a picture, but can I shake your hand?’ That is a human connection.”
There’s something of the same contest (or negotiation) in the movie. Lipsky wants to be liked and respected by Wallace, who’s only three years older but far more successful. He could be writing a hatchet job, or he might secretly want to be friends. Eisenberg, as always, is smart about tipping his character’s intentions.
(For the record, I saw and recommend the movie, directed by James Ponsoldt of “Smashed and The Spectacular Now,” written by playwright Donald Margulies.)
How press-savvy or press-shy is Wallace here? “I think that Wallace had the benefit, if that’s what you want to call it, of having done Lipsky’s job,” says Segel.
“He had done profiles on people, so he was acutely aware of the fact that Lipsky had the ability to go and shape the story any way he chooses. As somebody who is likely the biggest brain in the room, (he’s) able to sniff out that Lipsky has an agenda.”
In the movie, the wary Wallace can certainly sense Lipsky’s brew of resentment, envy, and hero worship, says Segel.
“I zeroed in on what for me what was a helpful view of the dynamic, which is a guy talking to his younger self. A guy who could see himself 10 years earlier in Lipsky. Because it allowed me … to have tremendous empathy for this younger self, but it also gave me some freedom to yell at him. You know, to hate him. Like, man, get your head out of your ass!”
“The End of the Tour”
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Rating: R, strong language including some sexual references
Showing: SIFF Cinema Egyptian, Sundance Cinemas Seattle
Director: James Ponsoldt
Cast: Jason Segel, Jesse Eisenberg, Anna Chlumsky
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