✯✯ 1/2
If you asked me four hours ago who David Foster Wallace was, I would have just stared at you in confusion and wondered who you were talking about. Now, if presented with this question, I would answer "Oh yeah! That guy Jason Segel played as in The End of the Tour."
Alas, I had no foreknowledge of Wallace and his smash hit novel Infinite Jest, acclaimed by Time as one of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923. The name and the title had never before fallen on my ears, and as I watched The End of the Tour, I quickly looked him up and became mildly acquainted with his background. Sadly, the film doesn't do much to bring me up to speed on Wallace or the circumstances surrounding the interview, trying too hard to quickly shove its way into being an Almost Famous of this decade. There wasn't anything particularly memorable about this film, and it even has a really cliché "split" story element about halfway through that seems too mainstream among other interview films. The interviewer (Eisenberg) and the subject (Segel) get in a heated debate, which really doesn't become very heated (possibly because of Wallace's passive nature).
Don't get me wrong, Segel shows that he has a lot of untapped dramatic talent, and Eisenberg is, of course, great. However, The End of the Tour seems perfectly content with staying in one place, pace-wise. Everything just seems to coast along, and there wasn't a lot to keep me interested, let alone the fact that I knew literally nothing about these people. It just seems disappointing that I could see all the talent in Segel and none of it was really allowed to come out. It wasn't his fault by any means. It was the film, or probably more appropriately, the director. James Ponsoldt seemed content with keeping his film coasting along, never really drawing us in with juicy tidbits of Wallace's past and secret life. Indeed, Wallace was a very secretive man, but he didn't work his way around this barrier very well.
The good news is that yes, Jason Segel does indeed have great acting talent. If he could get himself into some more serious films like this one, he could really be given a chance to shine and show what he's truly made of. Unfortunately, this film seems to like keeping that untapped potential inside, rather choosing to keep him as a mumbling, introverted character. He isn't all that interesting of a subject to begin with, and spending 106 minutes barely scratching the surface of a man I never knew before didn't really do much for me. Perhaps, had I been more familiarized with Wallace and his literary works, The End of the Tour would have made much more sense to me and I would have enjoyed it on an entirely different level. But sadly, it suffers the same issues that plague American Sniper: examining an individual, expecting the audience to know everything about him beforehand. I'm not asking for details on his personal life, but some insight into the guy would have been nice to have in the film. If I wanted to do research when watching a film, I'd have gone with Stalker. This film is too shallow to require extensive research to understand, although it is hall marked by a couple great performances by its lead actors.