A looming death takes over many lives

      In the spring of 2015, Esquire published what would become a prize-winning article by journalist Matthew Teague. Teague took an unusual approach to the subject of dying, opting for vivid descriptions of the assaults on his wife's cancer-riddled body.

     "We don't tell each other the truth about dying, as a people. Not real dying. Real dying, regular and mundane dying, is so hard and so ugly that it becomes the worst thing of all: It's grotesque. It's undignified," Teague wrote.

     Teague's article wasn't long, but it included graphic details of what happened to Nicole Teague's body after she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. 

     Another aspect of the article involved Teague's friend Dane Faucheux, a man who helped Teague and his wife in what amounted to a heroic, perhaps unexplainable act of friendship. 

     Faucheux  abandoned his life in New Orleans, moved into the Teague's Alabama home, helped care for the couple's two young daughters, and even took the family pet to the vet to be put down. Matthew was too immersed in Nicole's travails to deal with another death.

     If you read the Esquire article, it's nothing short of astonishing to think that anyone would make a movie based on Teague's story. It's difficult to imagine that audiences would want to spend a couple of hours looking at the bodily dissolutions that Teague's article dutifully reports.

     I suppose it's no surprise then that director Gabriela Cowperthwaite and screenwriter Brad Ingelsby have taken a softer approach to Teague's story in Our Friend. With Casey Affleck as Matthew, Dakota Johnson as Nicole, and Jason Segel as Dane, the movie is less about the indignities of dying than the  ways in which Nicole's dying impacts an entire family. 

    Affleck (Manchester by the Sea) has become a master of miserable, an actor who's able to incorporate gloom into his entire being. The skill obviously serves him well in Our Friend. 

     Johnson seems equally well-suited to portray a vibrant young woman with an interest in musical theater. 

     It falls to Segel to create the movie's most complicated and in some ways least understandable character, a lovable guy who's  capable of amazing generosity but incapable of sustaining romantic relationships.

     Dane first meets Nicole when the two are working in theater in New Orleans. He's smitten but learns that Nicole already is married. He stays in her life, though, becoming a good friend to Matthew and to Nicole, even as other of their friends find him weird, even a bit pathetic.

    Cowperthwaite tells the story in fragments that hopscotch through time, painting a portrait of relationships that are tested by Nicole's diagnosis, which becomes the anchoring event for a movie that flashes back and forward from that painful moment. 

    Playing with time has mixed results, pushing us into episodes in which Matthew works as a war correspondent while a frustrated Nicole holds down the home front, scenes in which Dane gives up on relationships of his own to be a helpful friend, and even a bout of marital infidelity that nearly topples the Teague marriage.

     We get just enough about the Teague daughters (Violet McGraw and Isabella Kai) to keep that aspect of the story from feeling neglected. 

    The impact of this time-scattered approach tends to rob the movie of its capacity to build, sometimes creates confusion, and  puts a heavier burden on incident than on allowing the characters to deepen. 

     Still, Cowperthwaite and her cast make you feel how inadequate we all are when it comes to facing a devastating loss -- and how improbably selfless people sometimes can be. Maybe that's enough to encourage us to overlook the movie's flaws. 

     By the way, you may well ask, is Our Friend a tearjerker? Hell, yes.

 

A close encounter with a literary star

David Foster Wallace meets a journalist in The End of the Tour The result: An intriguing movie.

The End of the Tour, a movie about a literary promotional tour taken by the late David Foster Wallace, is less a movie than a conversation.

That's not to say that End of the Tour, which stars Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as a journalist who's writing a Rolling Stone article about the author, lacks cinematic flavor.

As directed by James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now), End of the Tour has the personal tension of a theatrical piece, but the movie also opens the door to Wallace's unkempt private world.

I've never had much interest in Segel (Forgetting Sarah Marshall). He's mostly as a comic actor, but he's never been better than he is as Wallace, a writer of disheveled charm and much admired accomplishment.

Siegel conveys Wallace's insecurities, his ordinariness (which may partly have been a pose) and his casual expressions of brilliance.

When Wallace stops to consider the answer a question, he's not stalling for time: He's really thinking -- not only about what he wants to say, but about how it might sound in an interview.

Eisenberg, an actor of accusatory nervousness, is equally good as David Lipsky, the author and journalist who accompanied Wallace on the tail end of a book tour that ended in Minneapolis.

Lipsky wrote Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, which was published 2010.

The events Lipsky wrote about, and which form the basis of the movie, take place in 1996. With Infinite Jest catching fire, Wallace began to learn the joys and liabilities of being a literary star, someone approached by outsiders with reverence.

For the most part, The End of the Tour is a two-hander with brief support coming from Mamie Gummer and Mickey Sumner as women who turn up for Wallace's reading in Minneapolis.

Joan Cusack has a funny turn as the person assigned to "handle" Wallace in Minneapolis, a thankless job performed by a cheerfully dim woman.

After listening to Wallace's interview with the local public radio station, Cusack's character says that she found the author so interesting, she might have to read his book.

Levels of complexity ripple through The End of the Tour.

An envious Lipsky tries to be as smart and perceptive as possible, but he seems to know that he's not on Wallace's level. And, yes, it matters to him.

For his part, Wallace isn't only talking to Lipsky, he's talking to himself, airing fears about how celebrity, though desirable in small doses, may actually destroy him. Can an icon, even a newly minted one, ever have normal conversations?

The movie opens in 2008 with Lipsky learning about Wallace's death. The story then flashes back to the meeting that constitutes the bulk of the movie. Some of this close encounter takes place in Wallace's home, some in Lipsky's rented car, and some in hotel rooms.

Our knowledge of Wallace's death adds eerie resonance to much of what follows. His insecurities never seem trivial.

The same can't be said for some of Wallace's pop-cultural preoccupations: Crappy television and movies and junk food washed down with soda become bricks in the wall Wallace builds to zone himself off from the world.

The End of the Tour isn't a bio-pic. You won't learn anything about Wallace's early life. When we meet him, he's teaching writing at Illinois State University. He avoids the New York limelight. He covers his head with an ever-present bandanna, but worries that even that may be seen as an affectation, a bit of self-conscious branding.

His problem: He's an observer who suddenly has become the observed.

Lipsky sleeps on a mattress on the floor of Wallace's modest, disheveled home, and the two men develop an intimacy that keeps blurring lines: Are they friends? Are they journalist and subject? Are they a couple of competitive writers? Is it possible to have an honest conversation with a tape recorder constantly running?

End of the Tour is a movie about intimacy in a contrived context, about letting one's guard down and about protecting private places. It's an intriguing endeavor, and it has been made with intelligence, humor and haunting traces of wistful sadness.

The world eventually would lose Wallace; here we see a writer who may already have been losing himself.

A few laughs in this long engagement

Jason Segel and Emily Blunt star in an uneven but sometimes winning romantic comedy.

What happens if she receives the career offer of a lifetime, but he must take a backward to keep the relationship going? That entirely possible post-feminist question gives The Five Year Engagement a nice boost in the romantic comedy department: The movie takes a fairly realistic look at how one man's eager accommodations gradually turn into seething resentment.

Five Year Engagement has something else going for it: Jason Segel and Emily Blunt. They're both playing life-sized characters, and for once, we get to hang out with two people who actually seem to enjoy each other's company.

Segel co-wrote this comedy with Nicholas Stoller, the same partner with whom he wrote Forgetting Sarah Marshall. This time the duo -- Stoller also directed -- creates a movie that has an easy-going appreciation of oddball touches, but which also is burdened by its two-hour length, some dry spells and a fair amount of repetition.

The story begins in earnest when Segel's Tom gives up a premier sous chef's job in San Francisco to follow his fiancee to a research assistant's post at the University of Michigan.

In Michigan, Segel's Tom is forced to take a job for which he's obviously over-qualified, making sandwiches at Zingerman's Deli, evidently a fabled Ann Arbor institution.

Tom tries to make the best of things, even going native at point. He takes up hunting and grows an unruly set of Michigan-style mutton chops as if to prove to himself that he not only likes Michigan but fits into a stereotypical mid=American lifestyle.

The story's central problem -- Tom's increasing unhappiness -- can make it seem as if the screenplay is spinning its wheels in much the same way as Tom does, being pleasant and stuck at the same time. And at times, Five Year Engagement feels like a rough draft in which the authors couldn't bear to part with anything.

Tom's on a downward career spiral just as Blunt's Violet is beginning to find real career fulfillment under the tutelage of a psychology professor played by Rhys Ifans.

The love affair between Violet and Tom contrasts with another relationship. Violet's sister (Alison Brie) marries one of Tom's former kitchen colleagues (Chris Pratt). Pratt has the movie's grossest moments and also its funniest moment, which involves a Spanish love song.

Because the good parts of Five Year Engagement are very good, you long for what might have been had Stoller and Segel applied a bit more discipline to their task.

Violet's fellow grad students (Randall Park, Mindy Kaling and Kevin Hart) are supposed to provide on-going comic relief, but don't always rise to the occasion. (When it comes to satirizing the academic community, the movie's a bit of a dud.) Chris Parnell, as a fellow faculty spouse and one of Tom's few friends, earns some laughs, as does Brian Posehn, as a shaggy pickle aficionado and one of Tom's co-workers at Zingerman's.

Despite a plethora of quirky touches, Five Year Engagement doesn't always feel daringly original. When Violet almost strays from her loyalty to Tom, the script turns schematic. It tries to balance things by putting Tom in a compromising position. And Stoller's more exaggerated attempts at humor (a semi-serious joke involving a crossbow) represent bad notes sounded loudly.

After two movies together, Segel and Stoller have shown real potential, a promise that badly needs to be fully realized. Maybe the third time -- if there is one -- will be the absolute charm.

Adrift and waiting for a sign

To date, the best film from the Duplass brothers (Jay and Mark) remains 2010's Cyrus, a comedy starring John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill and Marisa Tomei. Cyrus began a movement by the brothers toward movies that retain the offbeat mumblecore edge of previous work (The Puffy Chair and Baghead), but also incorporate mainstream elements, particularly when it came to casting. Jeff Who Lives at Home, the latest from the Duplass brothers, continues the brothers' mash-up approach, this time putting Jason Segel and Ed Helms at the center of a comedy about two very different brothers, each weird in his own way.

Segel's 30-year-old Jeff -- the title character -- lives with his widowed mother (Susan Sarandon), and seems to be stuck in life's mud. Jeff smokes a lot of dope, and appears to have been unduly influenced by M. Night Shyamalan's movie, Signs. Jeff's waiting for his prolonged state of limbo to be shattered by something semi-miraculous. He can't get on with his life until he receives a message from the universe, a sign that will help him chart a course out of his mother's basement. To the rest of the world, this may look like emotional paralysis, but Jeff has confidence that his destiny will be revealed to him.

Brother Pat (Helms) isn't housebound; he has a job working in a paint store and a wife (Judy Greer). Avid and ambitious, Pat longs to climb the ladder of success. He buys things he can't afford (a Porsche) and neglects his wife, who was planning to use the Porsche money to put a down payment on a house. Using household money to indulge a male fantasy is never a good idea, and Pat's purchase leads to trouble. So does his overly aggressive personality.

Not surprisingly, Jeff eventually receives his sign -- or what the takes to be his sign. It arrives in the form of a phone call that introduces him to the name Kevin. Jeff's new mission: find Kevin, a search that produces laughs -- albeit in a low-key register. In keeping with the brothers' scaled-down approach, the story unfolds during the course of one day in Jeff's life.

At a fleet 82 minutes, Jeff Who Lives at Home makes room for some well-executed comic scenes. When Pat and Jeff spy on Pat's wife Linda in hopes of catching her in the midst of an affair, the movie flirts with classic farce.

Meanwhile, Sarandon's Sharon tells a workmate (Rae Dawn Chong) that she's been receiving messages from a secret admirer. Sharon's wary, but the messages quicken her pulse. Could romance be lurking? Will a long-smouldering fire suddenly be re-lit? Can she ever get Jeff to complete a chore?

The Duplass brothers are good at finding absurd humor in moments of fallibility. Jeff Who Lives at Home isn't nearly as sharp or distinctive as Cyrus, but it has enough offbeat humor to get by, and Segal makes Jeff seem like a decent enough slacker, a good-hearted fellow who's mired in a world where cosmic jolts are a definite rarity.