Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

The End of the Tour Blu-ray Movie Review

The road to becoming yourself.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 9, 2015

Though the quote has been reported in various slightly different forms, sometime in the 1970s the inimitable Gore Vidal said something along the lines of, “Every time a friend of mine succeeds, a little bit of me dies inside.” It was a funny take on what might also be thought of as the “flip side” to Schadenfreude. (The wonderful Amanda Green later musicalized Vidal’s quote in a humorous quasi country and western tune.) There’s a somewhat similar sensibility going on in The End of the Tour, though it actually begins with “mere” jealousy, letting the friendship evolve later, albeit under conditions where one "friend" looks longingly at the other "friend"'s success. Christopher Guest’s delicious send up of regional theater, Waiting for Guffman, had a great little vignette where one of the characters was attempting to market “action figures” based on My Dinner with André, an obviously ridiculous approach given that film's static environment. In a way The End of the Tour could be thought of as Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky’s dinners with noted author David Foster Wallace, with a similar emphasis on talky dialetics and a similar deficit in the ostensible “action” department, despite director James Ponsoldt's attempts to open things up by having the conversation move to other environments like cars. This real life tale is told in flashback, after Wallace has died and Lipsky begins thinking back to an eventful few days Lipsky spent with Wallace in the wake of Wallace’s immense success with his novel Infinite Jest. And that’s where the green eyed monster of envy first rears its ugly head— Lipsky is a struggling novelist himself, and he is both enticed and perplexed by Wallace’s overwhelming good fortune. While Lipsky may wonder about the karma of it all, one thing he can’t deny is Wallace’s formidable writing talent, and that at least offers Lipsky an entrée into interviewing Wallace, a man who for various reasons isn’t particularly interested in being interviewed.

The End of the Tour actually opens fairly breathlessly, something that may lead some viewers to think they’re going to be experiencing something brisk and fast moving. The opening few minutes of the film quickly glide by a glut of establishing premises, positing David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) in “current” times finding out that Wallace has died. Lipsky then finds an old Walkman and a pile of cassette tapes of interview sessions he conducted with the author some twelve years previously. The film then segues to that prior time period, again quickly detailing Lipsky’s stalled career as a novelist, his disbelief over the kind of reviews that Wallace is enjoying for Infinite Jest, and then, finally after Lipsky has actually read the book (giving a one word “review” which aptly sums up how gobsmacked he is by Wallace’s writing talent), pestering his Rolling Stone editor for the chance to interview Wallace rather than to write another meaningless 500 word article on a boy band.

That finally gets Lipsky out to the cold and semi-barren environs of Wallace’s home in Illinois, on the eve of the last leg of Wallace’s book tour in support of Infinite Jest. Wallace (Jason Segel) seems friendly enough, even if he’s already told Lipsky to “lose [his] phone number” when Lipsky gets lost and calls the author looking for directions. Both of the men are nervous, though for different reasons, and they kind of dance around each other in some early sparring sessions as they measure each other up.

There’s a really interesting little moment in this early sequence where Lipsky, having asked for a bit of Wallace’s chewing tobacco (as an alternative to otherwise ubiquitous cigarettes), finds he doesn’t like it, and asks to use the bathroom. While there, Lipsky opens up the medicine cabinet and begins jotting down the litany of drugs he finds inside. It’s a slightly discomfiting moment where the audience’s entrée into the story and indeed to Wallace himself is shown to perhaps be a mere muckraker. Later, this potential breach of propriety returns (more than once), as Lipsky starts to probe Wallace about Wallace’s unkempt emotional past, which has included at least one suicide attempt and brief institutionalization.

That history provides some of the prickly subtext that informs the conversations between the two, but perhaps surprisingly The End of the Tour shies away from any overly florid dramatics, at least for the most part. Instead, Lipsky and Wallace ruminate about matters great and small, while also struggling somewhat awkwardly to establish something beyond a mere “interviewer-subject” relationship.

But this is where The End of the Tour may perhaps not satisfy some viewers, for the film’s interest stems not from huge “plot arcs”, but instead in the more quiet evolution of the interplay between the two. Part of the issue is that Wallace himself tended to deal in isolation in his writing, and in fact the character in the film offers up various philosophical ruminations on the nature of “modern” high tech life, one where people are surrounded by their electronics and are therefore not forced to interact with each other on a human level. That fact gives a certain dissociative aspect to the film that may make it feel distant for some searching for an emotional catharsis.

While various supporting characters wander in and through the film, including a fun turn by Joan Cusack as a host on one leg of the tour, and Meryl Streep’s daughter Mamie Gummer as one of a pair of women whose interaction with the guys leads to some dysfunction, the film is essentially a so-called “two hander”, depending almost entirely upon the performance acumen of Eisenberg and Segel to achieve its dramatic impact. While Eisenberg provides another kind of nervous, darting ambience to Lipsky that may remind some of a somewhat similar take he gave Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, Segel is revelatory in a role that finally allows the actor to do something other than a goofy stoner type. His Wallace is both surprisingly open and vulnerable, while also showing signs of wariness and even aggression at times. It’s a startling portrayal, one given all the more power by how unshowy and “small” it frequently is.

The End of the Tour Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The End of the Tour is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. While the film isn't quite a verité in the strictest sense of the term, the lo-fi on the fly ambience that director James Ponsoldt and cinematographer Jakob Ihre go for often gives the film a quasi-documentary feel, and as such the image here rarely rises to the pristine, razor sharp precision that some fans of contemporary cinema have come to expect. The palette is perhaps intentionally muted throughout the presentation, and quite often Ponsoldt and Ihre shoot either directly into light or at least toward it, something that when combined with somewhat anemic contrast tends to make some scenes look fairly washed out and at least relatively lacking in detail (see screenshots 10 and 14 for two examples). In relatively normal lighting conditions, detail is very good to excellent, and the image, while not incredibly sharp, is precise and natural looking. There are occasional very slight compression problems, perhaps due to the frequency of low lighting, where grain resolves a bit wonkily, including taking on a multicolored edge at times.

The End of the Tour Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Much as with the video component, The End of the Tour's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix isn't showy by any stretch of the imagination, but gets the job done, and in fact opens up considerably when some of the source cues give the soundtrack some force (Wallace was a big Alanis Morissette fan, and her music figures somewhat prominently at key points). Otherwise, though, the film plays out in intimate dialogue scenes, rarely if ever featuring more than two people at a time, and as such surround activity is at least relatively restrained. Fidelity is excellent, while dynamic range is pretty narrow aside from some of the musical elements. Danny Elfman's surprisingly lyrical score, something decidedly different than some of his whimsically minor keyed outings for Tim Burton, is quite evocative and sounds great in this lossless presentation.

The End of the Tour Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary with Director James Ponsoldt, Writer Donald Margulies and Actor Jason Segel. This is a "well behaved" commentary, with the participants taking turns for the most part. They get into everything from the adaptive process to how the story and characters needed to be approached.


• Behind the Tour (1080p; 24:41) is an above average making of featurette which includes lots of candid and behind the scenes footage.


• A Conversation with Composer Danny Elfman (1080p; 8:24) is a nice piece featuring some interesting comments from the composer.


• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 7:30)

The End of the Tour Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I'm frankly not quite sure that The End of the Tour is as profound as it seems to think it is, but it's a generally compelling short form "road movie" that's compressed to just a handful of days. The interplay between Lipsky and Wallace is intellectually fascinating, but emotional content tends to be subtextual a lot of the time, meaning some viewers are going to have to work for a little bit to attain any catharsis. Technical merits are generally very good to excellent, and The End of the Tour comes Recommended.