Our Highest Rec: End of the Tour Is Right About Writers

Our Highest Rec is when the staff proposes something they find underappreciated, undervalued, or underrated. It's an excuse for us to push our opinions on you.

Screened entertainment seems to have a hard time with characters who write for a living. Not in a lack-of-representation sort of way, but more in a “we don’t know how to portray this career accurately” way. Most journalists are presented as scummy or unempathetic (House of Cards, Scream) and authors are, well, also presented as scummy and unempathetic (House of Cards again, and Westworld). It’s rare that a writer is drawn with complication or nuance, so when they are—evidenced by the exaltation of movies like All the President’s Men and Spotlight—we notice.

This brings us to End of the Tour, a Jason Segal and Jesse Eisenberg two-hander from 2015. This movie dramatizes a real-life 1996 interview between reporter David Lipsky (Eisenberg—doing a lot of that bemused head-tilt thing he likes) and author David Foster Wallace (Segal—patient, powerful, still underappreciated). The scenario, an upstart fanboy reporter interviewing his hero, is complicated and microcosmic and makes for one of those movies where a lot of things are left unsaid, but still made explicit through performances and subtext. By all accounts, it has every reason to fail.

The precedent of writer-movies means End of the Tour should be terrible, and in a universe where this movies is made 100 times, we probably come out with 99 stinkers. Those versions would be too talky, too patronizing, too philosophical, or too self-indulgent. Somehow, the movie we have is none of those things. End of the Tour is a wonderful watch, and the best part is, it’s not good despite the presence of two writer-characters. It’s good because of its two writer-characters.

There’s a temptation to say this movie is about David Foster Wallace, but that gives the impression that End of the Tour is sort of a snapshot biopic, which it isn’t. We’re not here to learn who Wallace was or gain some insight into why he committed suicide; we’re just here, like Lipsky, to spend a weekend with him. We jump in at the end of Wallace’s Infinite Jest book tour and just sort of relax for a while. We meet his dogs and eat some junk food and watch TV; it’s nice. This movie is like a weekend where you didn’t make a ton of plans but still ran into some friends by chance. Oh, hey! You doing anything right now? Want to go see what’s playing at the movies later? It’s a fun catch-up. There’s no haughty purpose at work here and no gotcha motive. End ofthe Tour never swerves. It’s peaceful that way.

Of course, what drives the movie is the fact that, of course, its protagonist has an ulterior motive. Lipsky needs a story from Wallace. He needs him to spill. Lipsky carries an old-fashioned tape recorder and a notebook and pen (shoutout 1996), and when those things appear onscreen, it’s like your mom showed up early to pick you up from the birthday party. The fun stops and the filters come up. Lipsky, the reporter, prepares his infiltrations. Wallace, the subject, bristles and mans the defenses. A buddy movie becomes a cat-and-mouse. It’s uncomfortable to watch. It feels exploitative and opportunistic. It’s sort of slimy.

Here’s the rub, though: That’s what interviewing someone is like. President’s Men and Spotlight are great for their representations of grind-it-out reporting, but they don’t explore (and it’s fine—they don’t have to) the paper maché constructs that manifest during interviews. The journalist usually tries to play things buddy-buddy because after all, when we feel we’re amongst friends, we share more of our secrets. The subject puts an image not for the reporter, but for the public, because the subject knows the reporter is really a catalyst to thousands, maybe millions, of people. Both sides project images onto the other’s face, and it makes the process precarious, hesitant, and all-around excruciating. It’s impossible to know when the opposite side is being on-the-level, and as long as that status is up in the air, there’s no way to be on-the-level in turn. We reciprocate the level of openness we see in others. The lines we won’t cross move in unison until—and this is the rarest of things—they meet in the middle.

And that’s the secret to End of the Tour’s success. It embodies this conflict so well that, before we know it, we as the audience begin to let our guard down. This movie is so quiet, so deliberate, so determined, that it doesn’t take long to see how honest it is. Its background and circumstance is tragic—a brilliant author gone too soon—but there’s nothing manipulative, contrived, or gloss-washed to be seen. It’s amazing. Even the moment that would be every other movie’s Oscar-reel speech is specifically not commodified here. In fact, the character interrupts himself. He comes back later to finish the thought and amend his words. That’s not how movie characters are supposed to talk. That’s actually how people talk.

And when we’re faced with a movie this honest, we respond by being honest in turn. We meet in the middle. We allow ourselves to reflect on things and wonder about things and second-guess things and feel things. We ask questions. We make wishes. We wonder what it all means. And isn’t that where we find the purpose of art to begin with?

End of the Tour is a remarkable little movie. It doesn’t dumb down the writing experience, and that’s already rare and special, but it’s most commendable for how it places us within the writing experience. We’re not just voyeurs to a great man’s life; we’re placed in that man’s life, his day-to-day process, directly. In that way, even though the movie isn’t out to expose “the real David Foster Wallace,” it still feels like it does. But we’re not just watching a life. We’re sharing in it. That’s the power of great writing, after all.