Just saw 'The End of the Tour' - a quick review

I was fortunate enough to catch the David Foster Wallace biopic at the Roger Ebert Film Festival last night. It included a Q&A after with Jason Segel and the Director James Ponsoldt.

Let me just start out by saying that everything about this movie seems genuine. So much so that initially, my feeling was that Segel was underplaying Wallace - but actually that's not the case at all. The stupid, hollywoodized, over played mannerisms that we all expect from Biopics about eccentrics just weren't there, and it plainly makes for a much better film. Bottom line - Segel plays a surprisingly convincing DFW.

Over the course of the 5 days spent with Wallace on his Book tour in 1996, RollingStone reporter David Lipsky (played by Jesse Eisenberg) constantly used his recorder to capture the conversations he had with Wallace - while the article he interviewed Wallace for never reached completion at RS, the conversations between Wallace and Lipsky in TEOTT are almost exclusively based on these recordings.

One of my biggest fears was that DFW would be overplayed, or written for poorly - but because of superb acting and particular circumstances concerning how these conversations were written/recorded, it is absolutely the case that my fears were misplaced.

After about a minute of this expectation subsiding, it becomes extremely easy to forget that Wallace is being played by an actor. Huge portions of real life conversations are beautifully and often identically retold, which results in something that feels real - because the conversations themselves actually happened.

If someone were to try and make a movie about the entire story of DFW, it would almost certainly be a disaster. Sure, there could be phenomenal directing, and good acting, but the task of writing original, phony lines for DFW would be one that few writers would touch, and that none would succeed at.

Director James Ponsoldt nailed it! The lighting and camerawork in TEOTT are gritty and truthful. There's nothing fantastic about the house of DFW, or the landscape of the frozen tundra of Bloomington, Illinois. At every chance given to make the movie more palatable, Ponsoldt opts out - which again results in a more rewarding experience for realists and fans of the author.

DFW didn't write books for the masses, but rather concerns himself with ideas that were more difficult and time consuming, and inaccessible, but perhaps more worthwhile if understood. While this film might be well received by large audiences, I'm happy to report that it's almost certainly a film for DFW readers, and people who are willing to think hard about the content of very good conversations.

'The End of the Tour' is extraordinarily smart and makes no concessions when portraying the life of a genius.