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ARTS AND CULTURE

Partial portrait of a doomed artist as a young man

  • 10 December 2015

The End of the Tour (M). Director: James Ponsoldt. Starring: Jason Segel, Jesse Eisenberg, Anna Chlumsky, Mamie Gummer, Joan Cusack. 106 minutes

'Is it just me?' writer and critic Glenn Kenny wrote back in July. 'Dave hasn't even been dead ten years ... his death is still a very raw thing to those who survived him.' The Dave that Kenny is referring to is his late friend, David Foster Wallace, the American fiction writer, who is the focus of director James Ponsoldt's new film, The End of the Tour. The film recreates the five days Wallace spent with Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky in 1996, following the publication of his famed epic novel Infinite Jest.

It is clearly intended as a tribute and a sympathetic character study. But, according to Kenny, its 'reverence actually works in reverse; it's stifling'. His scathing assessment echoes the statement released in April last year by the Foster Wallace Trust (not some faceless legalistic monolith, but a small entity headed by visual artist Karen Green, who was married to Wallace from 2004 until his death in 2008), thoroughly disowning the planned biopic and claiming Wallace himself would not have approved.

Such criticism echoes in the gap that exists for all famous figures between their public and private lives. The claim from those who knew and loved Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, 12 years after Infinite Jest, is that this is an unfaithful, or at best partial, portrayal of him. The film looks back from the moment of his death to a version of Wallace at the peak of his fame. By doing so it inevitably seeks out signs of mental fragility. The unavoidable implication is that he is an artist doomed by his own brilliance.

This is both limited and reductionist. Yet the existence of this conversation — about the discrepancy between public and private lives, and whether or not the film is faithful — actually enriches the film, which purports to be true yet consists of layers of artifice, some of which it addresses explicitly. It is based on the interviews with Wallace conducted by Lipsky in 1996, but not published until 2010, two years after Wallace's death, as the memoir Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.

Lipsky's book was adapted for the screen by Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies, whose screenplay is in turn brought to life by acclaimed The Spectacular Now director James Ponsoldt. So The

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