So I decided to read and remark upon all the awards scripts that are going around in Caty’s excellent post.
The End of the Tour
is a word-lover’s script about a hero writer, with built-in pilgrimage sales to everyone who was transformed, even for a moment, by Infinite Jest. It is based on a book written by a Rolling Stone writer who interviewed Wallace and recounts the events of a pretty uneventful few days.
It succeeds as a dialogue of ideas, while managing to convey beautifully how uncomfortable it must have been to be David Foster Wallace, who is driven at every waking moment to translate his exact unvarnished self into floods of words to prevent the debilitating horror of being even slightly misinterpreted.
It’s an exhausting space in which to spend 85 pages.
The conflicts aren’t many, but they are honest. Both men wobble before the greedy banshees of their egos, struggling to separate what is true from what merely tempts them. They clash over a woman, mildly, but the ripples threaten to overturn their tentative connection. It is a very small stage, and luckily does not try to make more of its subject that the cash-in whiffiness of the source material allows. It’s a little peek, but it works well.
The success of the script will depend on the performances.
Project Recommendation: Recommend