Thoughts on David Foster Wallace and ‘The End of the Tour’ | by Bret Easton Ellis | Medium
For many of us who couldn’t get through the David Foster Wallace novel Infinite Jest (and tried a few times), and found the journalism bloated and minor-key condescending, and thought the puling Kenyon commencement speech was pure BS, and resisted the coronation of Wallace since his suicide in 2008 as St. David, based on a particular and very American brand of sentimental narrative, the new film about Wallace, The End of the Tour, is surprisingly easy to take even though it’s reverential to a fault. Smoothly directed by James Ponsoldt and elegantly written by the playwright Donald Marguilies, it’s often static like filmed plays are — long dialogue scenes that shape up what is essentially a debate about authenticity — and you can either get stoned on all of the good intentions at hand or roll your eyes in disbelief that this was taken so seriously by everybody involved. The movie stars Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as David Lipsky, the Rolling Stone journalist who tags alon