Sadly surprisingly, when I looked up another film that helped me back in the day by Jonathan Levine called The Wackness, I saw that JL hadn’t had big big success since then…I mean, I shouldn’t judge as I didn’t see Warm Bodies, but am not a zombie fan.
But much like The Wackness, James Ponsoldt’s The end of the Tour was engaging and informative for my son, a recent college graduate. The conversations between Lipsky and Wallace were heartfelt male perspectives fictionalized fantastically by Eisenberg and Segel, respectively.
I also have a special place in my heart for David Foster Wallace in a six degrees of Kevin Bacon way. I wrote to Jonathan Franzen after his speaking engagement through the Rochester arts and Lectures series at least 10 years ago and was honored to receive 2 post cards from the writer. Likewise, David Foster Wallace was humble and caring toward his fans. In one movie scene, when Lipsky asks two women how they know DFW, one of them replied that she had simply written him a fan letter and they had struck up a correspondence. It’s no surprise that Wallace and Franzen were friends, in part, surely because they common humility and heart.
If you have a son who is anywhere from 22 to 35, The End of the Tour can provide male empathy that is often hard to impart. And Jason Segel deserves an Oscar nod for nailing the role of a truly gifted, yet tortured writer. David Foster Wallace would have been flattered.
