Movie Review: The End Of The Tour
KYW Newsradio
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Jason Segel's comedy credentials have long since been established.
As an ensemble player on television series such as Freaks and Geeks and How I Met Your Mother; as a comedic actor in films such as Knocked Up; Bad Teacher; I Love You, Man; Forgetting Sarah Marshall; The Five-Year Engagement; The Muppets; and Sex Tape; and as the writer of the latter four screenplays, he has surfaced as a comedy force to be reckoned with.
But his superlative dramatic work in The End of the Tour comes as somewhat of a revelation.
Segel portrays tragic genius David Foster Wallace, a professor and the author of the over-a-thousand-page 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, who struggled with depression and would take his own life in 2008 at the age of 46 – an event that took place after the events depicted in the film, but that hangs over every frame.
The film spans the five days in 1996 during which Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky, played by Jesse Eisenberg, extensively interviewed the acclaimed novelist and essayist as thirtysomethings with two fictional books under each belt.
So, yes, it's essentially two smart guys hanging out and talking – not the usual summer-flick formula, to be sure. But this meditation on life and art and creativity and success and fame forces the mood on you and sticks with you.
Yes, with the extensive-conversation premise and all that opinionating and philosophizing, the film can't help but recall the similar but superior talkfest, My Dinner with Andre. And while The End of the Tour isn't quite as entertaining or stimulating as that less downbeat classic, neither did the latter offer a performance as mesmerizing as that turned in by Segel.
Director James Ponsoldt (Off the Black, Smashed, The Spectacular Now) -- working from an adaptation of Lipsky's 2010 memoir, "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself," by Donald Margulies, a densely annotated transcript of their conversations -- chronicles the five days the two men spent together during a promotional tour for a Rolling Stone profile that would never be published.
Following Wallace's suicide, Lipsky retrieved the recordings of his Wallace interviews and turned them into a book, one that gives us Lipsky's point-of-view in his fictionalized accounting of events.
Not to discount the formidable work of Oscar nominee Eisenberg (The Social Network), in this remarkable two-hander, but his jittery, professionally envious journalist seems in line with what he has done before.
But Segel, whose superlative, nuanced performance transcends the limitations of the material, admirable as it is, and has Oscar nomination written all over it, gives us something we haven't seen from him before: a complex, deeply troubled, severely conflicted, self-deprecating brainiac.
Slice it any way you want, they, their chemistry, their guarded banter, their adversarial positioning, and their contrasting demeanors are something to see and hear.
So we'll author 3 stars out of 4 for a sparkling road-trip conversation piece. From beginning to end, The End of the Tour is riveting.
