This year’s Sundance is shaping up as the Bromance Fest. At least the fifth movie about an odd-couple buddy duo (and the only one without a stated homosexual element) I’ve seen is “The End of the Tour,”꧋ and it’s by far the most moving and profound of them all, with a funny, lightly intellectual script by Pulitzer Prize winning dramatist Donald Margulies that should merit heavy awards consideration.
Falling halfway between “Almost Famous” and “My Dinner with Andre,” this love song to the art of conversation is about a Rolling Stone journalist, David Lipsky (J✨esse Eisenberg) who is infatu💞ated with the postmodernist novelist David Foster Wallace’s gargantuan novel “Infinite Jest” and begs for the opportunity to profile the author, who is about to leave his snowbound rural home in Illinois for a five-day book tour to Minneapolis.
Wallace, played as a shambling, reflective, moody, acutely self-aware and rigorously honest lost soul by Jason Segel, immediately impresses Lipsky with his utter lack of pre✱tense, his fondness for his dogs and his appreciation (very much share🌺d by Lipsky) for junk food and Pepsi. Lipsky serves as an acolyte, a sounding board and a friend, and yet Wallace, himself an experienced journalist, is suspicious of his interlocutor’s motives.
Still, Wallace comes across as a man struggling mightily to be good, to produce worthy art and to steer himself away from his base desires. He allows that he’d love to leverage his fame for sex, but he’s also so shy and pas⛎sive that the only way he can picture a liaison occurring is if a fangirl should approach him at a book signing and inform him that she’ll appear at his hotel room later.
The script is so full of acute observations that I found myself scribbling down the whole movie as I was watching. Wallace says dogs are better than women because although (he stresses) he doesn’t have sex with the beasts, he can avoid the worry that he’s breaking their hearts. He doesn’t have a TV because he knows he would watch it nonstop, and says TV is the worst addiction of his life (though “Infinite Jest” deals heavily with drug abuse). He’s wary of fame because years toiling as a literary novelist were only endurable because he convinced himself that the acclaimed writers weren’t any good; now that he has joined the ranks of the 🌳well-known, he is suffering from cognitive dissonance. He disputes any notion that wearing a headband all the time is an “affectation;” it’s more like a “foible,” he says, one of his many defense mechanisms.
Perception overwhelms the poor man; filtering out and paring down everything he senses is a lifelong struggle, even as he realizes that being an artist doesn’t give him any speci🌜al license to complain o𝕴r wallow in depression. Near the end he remarks that one of the things he’s learned that makes him feel pretty smart is that he’s not really that much smarter than anyone else, nor gifted with a richer interior life. And he notes (five years before 9/11) that someone might plausibly jump out of a burning skyscraper not because he wants to die but because the alternative is too painful to contemplate.
All of this wisdom is given a special coloration by Wallace’s eventual suicide (of which we are told in the opening sce🔴ne) 12 years later. I was not much a fan of Wallace’s work, which struck me as showy and aggressively meta, the Ph.D. equivalent of a sweaty and ma🍌niacally entertaining Vegas act, nor did I like director James Ponsoldt’s alcoholism films “The Spectacular Now” and “Smashed,” but “The End of the Tour” is a remarkable film I can’t wait to see again.