Quendrith Johnson

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent

Absolutely no one in literary circles anywhere on Planet Earth would have approved the casting of Jason Segel, (the guy who does the Musical Puppet Rock Opera of Count Chocula in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”), as David Foster Wallace for the biopic “The End of The Tour” to be released on July 31.

But that’s why Segel’s unexpected interesting plasticity and flirt with authenticity as the late great literary giant known as David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), author of opus “Infinite Jest,” works on so many levels. So if there is any hat-eating to get started, please pass the ketchup, ps.

Directed by James Ponsoldt (“Spectacular Now”), who is from Georgia but was educated at Yale and Columbia, “The End of The Tour” is a tug of want between Segel’s David Foster Wallace, and Jesse Eisenberg’s David Lipsky, the Rolling Stone reporter who comes to interview the literary wonderboy. 

In simple terms, they both want what the other has, even how the other is perceived by the outside world, and this is the meat off the bones of Lipsky’s memoir based on audio tapes that is distilled here into the screenplay for End of Tour. No small attention should be paid to the fact that the adapter is Pulitzer Prize winning dramatist, Donald Margulies “Dinner with Friends” (2000), who was Ponsoldt’s professor. Meanwhile, Margulies, with a gleaming array of grants and endowments and PEN awards to his credit, is listed as an “adjunct professor” of English and Theater Studies at Yale. Talk about a reductive descriptor.

And that’s in some ways analogous to how End of Tour neglects to reflect the horrific true-life conflicting facets of the mercurial dead scribe at the story’s core. David Lipsky’s 2010 book, “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” chronicles (almost verbatim in the accompanying script) a “Gilligan’s Island”-like five-day bromance between Wallace and the reporter during the run of a book tour for “Infinite Jest.” But what it leaves out is the bulk of painful details that created the former tennis-pro-hopeful-turned-writer known as David Foster Wallace.

End of Tour is an affable distillation of the iconic DFW. Who, to the public, was a bandana-wearing literary titan aping normal, “a regular guy.” Wallace, by most accounts, hid the fact that the literary world had heralded him the inheritor of Ernest Hemingway, as greatest living novelist of his generation. By the same token, this movie is not a caricature, and haunts the borders of authentic at times. This realness takes shape as overwhelming sadness as the film unspools. Again, it is billed as a day-in-the-life as a conceit, so the shorthand is implied.

You’re supposed to instinctively know DFW killed himself some 12 years later; you’re supposed to get the line — “is it too po-mo” — means Post-Modern, and the ham-fisted reference to “McLean’s” (which actually has no possessive in the title), is McLean Hospital, where Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, James Taylor, and brilliant (late) mind John Nash were all locked up at one point. Wallace spent some alone-time there himself as an inpatient during his unsuccessful run at a PhD for a semester at Harvard. McLean is the teaching psych hospital of Harvard University.

What makes "The End of The Tour" less of an open digital casket viewing, and more of a two-man show, are the considerable skills on display.  As Ponsoldt noted,  “Having Jason and Jesse as collaborators in the filmmaking process was invaluable. Beyond their gifts as actors — and they both gave incredibly brave, honest, generous, vulnerable performances — they have brilliant imaginations and are great writers… the guys understand the life of a writer far more than most actors. They’ve both been humbled by the writing process, they understand (how) frustration and loneliness, and they know what makes a good scene.”

Now, as far as DFW, and what he would think? Consider the duct tape.

In fall of 2008, David Foster Wallace hanged himself using duct tape (on his wrists) to make sure he could not fight his way out of the noose. There is no final mention of DFW’s methods, no last screen scroll of text to serve as a coda, a cushion, a comfort to the duct tape — which also goes unmentioned. As does “The Pale King,” rightly so, as this work comes up much later in Wallace’s career. 

It was the big thing worked on before the fastidious hanging tree he made on his Claremont, Calif., patio. Pale King was left in detailed note-form with this title during the end-of-life period during which Wallace taught at Pomona College. The IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, is the setting. This unfinished book with the working title “The Pale King” (under which it was posthumously published) is about taxes. But one could also flesh out the writer’s intention.  If the proverbial only “sure” things in life are death and taxes, perhaps this book about taxes is really Wallace’s opus on death. Perhaps The Pale King (read: cadaver) is the corpse separated from his body of work. 

This is the kind of conjecture DFW inspires, a living breathing, sweating exploration of meaning and fearfulness.

Here is the opener of “The Pale King” — “Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco- brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak…” 

While Hemingway had his “scrotum-tightening green” style descriptors for the ocean, Wallace has a “tobacco-brown river,” and later on, an “ale-pale sun.” Was it as good as “Infinite Jest,” would he ever finish it? Was he afraid to finish it, and it finished him off? We’ll never know, just that his widow, his wife of four years, artist Karen Green, made a seven-foot-long “forgiveness machine” to cope with how her late husband could not control his “poignancy,” as she recalled. 

Eventually David Foster Wallace’s uncontested magnum opus “Infinite Jest” would end up being hyped as “A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives…” (Hachette Group jacket copy.)

So while End of Tour can be questioned for the swath of DFW’s life it leaves out, the movie should be applauded for the open invitation to explore the legacy of America’s best-in-a-generation literary icon for the Digital Age. Maybe the loss of David Foster Wallace at age 46 can only be summed up in a lyric, since he considered writing “music” of one's mind. The lyric? “There will never be another You.”“The End of The Tour,” directed by James Ponsoldt, is presented by Kilburn Media, Anonymous Content Productions in association with Modern Man Films, and stars Jason Segel, Jesse Eisenberg, Anna Chlumsky, Joan Cusack, Mamie Gummer, Ron Livingston, and Mickey Sumner. Look for it to be released on July 31, and visit http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/david-foster-wallace/infinite-jest/9780316920049/.

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