the end of the tour, the end of the book

I'm going to spoiler alert my review for "The End of the Tour," which is pretty ironic, since there's almost no story. The conceit of the film is that a young ambition journalist/novelist pitches Rolling Stone to write a piece about David Foster Wallace, who had just published "Infinite Jest." "We haven't done a piece on a writer in forever," he says, or so I paraphrase, and the rest of the movie is the interview, at the reclusive home of Wallace somewhere in middle America. I'm not really sure how to describe the movie becuase it's not really a buddy picture, nor is it a love story, nor is it really a traditional interview by any stretch of the imagination, even though Lipsky (Eisenberg) carries around a miniature tape recorder, but the movie doesn't even really go into this. Wallace (Segel) is both guarded and open, constantly questioning the process that he has signed up for, while Lipsky is both unprepared and innocent. Nor would I say the movie turns into a who is interviewing who switcheroo, though it plays at this, just like it plays at these two being friends, though nothing could be farther from the truth. "You're going to go back to New York and shape this into whatever you want," Wallace says, and he's right, since the truth can be manipulated to appear however a journalist wants to present it, but we're not sure this part of the movie even happens, so there's no deceit, or jealous backstabbing. We learn early on that Lipsky is jealous of Wallace's talent, and hasn't even read "Infinite Jest" (making him like most of the audience, or literary types in America!) To be honest, I have no idea what the movie was really about save a great acting performance by Segel, a good one by Eisenberg, pretty footage, and an homage to a unique recluse. They do take a trip to Minnesota for a reading and I really got carried away with it here, unconsciously thinking the script was building to some challenge, especially since Wallace gets mad at Lipsky for hitting on his ex-girlfriend, but that was about as much of a climax as "The End of the Tour" is going to give you. There's no kicker at the end, no epiphanies, no big revelations, and while I appreciate the movie for staying true to its zen like meditation of a Midwest snow drenched winter, the unconscious viewer in me was striving for some three act structure.

"The End of the Tour" ends with Lipsky giving an emotional reading about his Lost Weekend with Wallace, eating junk food instead of drinking. It makes sense that Lipsky would feel personally touched by Wallace offing himself since we only meet so many people when we're alive, but they aren't close in the movie, nor do we even get the sense that Lipsky is changed by the interview. I learned a day or two after seeing "The End of the Tour" that Lipsky's interview with Wallace never got published in Rolling Stone, and I'm going to guess that Lipsky wasn't able to shape it or turn it into an homage, or a tell-all. There is one scene where Lipsky is on the phone with his editor, and he's being asked to dig up some real dirt on Wallace, but he fails at this too. We learn that Wallace wasn't a junkie, and that he's a recovering alcoholic, fighting depression.

"The End of the Tour," doesn't tell us that the interview wasn't published, and this seems disingenuous to me. If anything, the movie ends heroically for Lipsky, but it doesn't feel this way, nor does it give us much of a chance to really grapple with this troubled/failed writer. Lipsky is too jealous of Wallace to give a good interview, but not nearly talented enough to really go one on one with Wallace. Sure, Wallace doesn't make a good interview easy, but he talked plenty, and there was certainly something a decent journalist could have taken from three days with one of America's best novelists, but watching the movie you just know that Lipsky won't be able to do what Wallace accuses him of doing.

"Don't forget, you agreed to do the interview," Lipsky admonishes Wallace once or twice, and this is true, but for some reason I didn't blame Wallace for this. He wasn't Salinger after the success of "Catcher in the Rye," and in a very human way Wallace was obviously trying to connect with the world, since he was a professor and a published author. Sure, he was a weird recluse, but even weird recluses sometimes have a social side, so the real enigma here is Lipsky. He was a young ambitious New Yorker looking for a break, but apparently blew it with the Wallace article, at least in the short run, and was only redeemed by Wallace's suicide, or else his 'memoir' about his lost weekend over junk food would be forgotten. Clearly, Lipsky wasn't able to gain the trust of his subject, marking him a bad interviewer right off the bat, and it feels almost sycophantic at the end when he reads about Wallace from his memoir, but that's not the desired result from the filmmakers. I know there are lots of good movies that have bad cheesy endings, but watching Wallace dance in a church social seemed like an abdication of the entire movie, and in no way shed any light on Lipsky's weasel like nature (true to Eisenberg's roles). If the audience had been told the interview had amounted to nothing it would have been more satisfying for the viewer. We would've known that we watched an interview that never saw the light of day, and like a debate we would've seen the winners and losers of the strange verbal sparring match between Wallace and Lipsky. We would've known Wallace won, or lost, depending on your point of view, because Lipsky was either too nice a guy to paint Wallace as an asshole, or too selfish a guy to paint him as a genius, leaving the audience hung to dry. Instead, we get Lipsky as a nice enough guy, with some character flaws, and Wallace as a beautiful soul. It's a subtle movie and there is a lot of enjoyment in "The End of the Tour," a movie about a failed interview between two writers at very different points in their career.