The Melbourne International Film Festival, Reviewed
The best, the worst, and the weirdest of what's coming to Australian movie screens in coming months.
The Film That Will Gently Soothe Your Inner Nerd:
The End of the Tour, dir. James Ponsoldt
Starring: Jason Segel, Jesse Eisenberg, Anna Chlumsky, Mamie Gummer
Reviewed by: Matt Roden
Cult grammar dweeb, author of a generation’s tour de for-fucks-sake-this-thing-is-huge literary behemoth, latter day saint of those of us just struggling to be good and patient in a tricky world, and meta self-reflective new-new-new journo who may have influenced the entire way language is used on the internet and therefore maybe 80 percent of our current communication (yes, including this sentence, and yes, this: the long self-referential conversational shit, okay, I’ll stop), it’s no surprise to see David Foster Wallace finally show up on screen. What may be surprising is that his fictionalised debut would be an indie two-hander road movie, in which he’s played by sitcom star who’s taken more opportunities to introduce us to his wang than his acting chops.
After creating dazzling works of both fiction and non-fiction, and writing quite openly about struggling with depression and anxiety, Wallace sadly took his own life in 2008. In the wake of this, another writer, David Lipsky, decided to release a transcript of a five-day interview he conducted with Wallace back in 1996, at the end of the book tour for Infinite Jest. The book would be life changing for Wallace, rocketing him to literary stardom and cultural genius status; life changing for people interested in reading gigantic tomes about media, America, drug addiction, psychology, and tennis; and life changing, perhaps, for Lipsky as well.
Played by Jesse Eisenberg, with his weasliness cranked up to kill, David Lipsky approaches the interview with seething beta neediness for approval and one-upmanship. He’s a tense terrier to Segel’s loping, good-natured retriever, and what results is a kind of mumblecore buddy movie — Planes, Trains and Auotmobiles by way of Before Sunset.
If you don’t know Wallace, I’m throughly interested in your impressions of the film, but what you’d likely get is some shaggy musings on the nature of journalism and jealously. How it’s weird to interview someone you admire, especially when they’re your contemporary, and how it’s even weirder to be so self-aware while under the interviewer’s spotlight. I don’t know if this film would want to make you read his work. But you should, because it is excellent.
Fans of Wallace might dislike Segel’s portrayal, and see it as simply a collection of affectations and props, or the way that the film engineers conflict, as a storytelling shortcut into the minds of these two men. But I had no issues with his take on the guy, or the film’s fleeting glance at a genius through another’s eyes. Remember that human existence cannot be captured in two hours on film, and it’s crazy that we keep trying to jam rich, complex, unique individuals into the formula.
Instead, the movie is a totally successful riff on the mindset of the writer, his themes, his obsessions, his flaws and his genius. The fact that a script about a great writer is all off-the-cuff conversation isn’t even a big deal — it just reminds us what was so special about what he lay down on the page.
For fans of: the longform.org podcast, dorm room conversations, and the sad clarity of hotel rooms
Opens in Australia: TBC