The world of writers, for all its rumoured excitements – sex and addictions, apparently – is not really sexy enough for celluloid. After all, long long hours angsting at a desk, angsting about the perfect lines to capture the mood of the hour, the season, or the century that the Latest Work (Ugh!) is currently in, or angsting about all the other writers who are playing the game far better in spite of being deeply inferior at the job, can get a bit tedious. Still, there are exceptions. And what exceptions!
The Hours, 2002, directed by Stephen Daldry
Based on the extraordinary eponymous novel by Michael Cunningham, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner award in 1999, The Hours is a sophisticated tribute to a novel – Mrs Dalloway – its writer, Virginia Woolf, and the curious ways in which the powerful material a classic has to offer can be transformed by another writer separated by decades to soar far and beyond its specific context (here, 1920s England) and become an account of the deep impulses of (upper-class) life and art.
1940s England: It is morning in the country, and Woolf, played by Nicole Kidman in a prosthetic nose, tells her husband Leonard that she has a first line for her new novel – ‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself’ – which surfaces, as first lines often do, between interruptions by the maid, bursts of anxiety about her sister’s impending visit, and a general if intense pining for London.
In two parallel counter-narratives set in America, and intertwined mysteriously with Woolf’s story, are a couple of memorable protagonists.
One is a pregnant suburban housewife, Mrs Brown (Julianne Moore), in a 1950s California domesticity that is crushing her soul, quite palpably, even as she bakes a cake for her husband’s birthday with her young son. The other is the chic New York book editor, Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep), who is, in 2001, throwing a party for her award-winning poet-friend dying of AIDS.
Together, three stories come together to narrate a jaggedly put-together version of a literary epic, but it’s executed with such post-modern panache that it takes your breath away.
Duplex, 2003, directed by Danny DeVito
Alex Rose (Ben Stiller) is a middlebrow novelist who is hoping to make it big with his next book. His wife, the irrepressible Nancy Kendricks (Drew Barrymore), works for a magazine. Together, they are looking high and low for a house they can co-own. A realtor (DeVito) convinces them to buy a gorgeous Brooklyn brownstone – a stunning structure, and humongous by NY standards – never mind the charming old lady who lives in the rent-controlled apartment on top and is likely to cop it soon.
Unfortunately for Alex, who has an editor breathing down his neck, the charming old lady, apparently at death’s door, changes colour almost as soon as they’ve bought the house. She turns out to be a manipulative shrew, and all hell breaks loose. A rib-tickling comedy with twists and turns in the plot, Duplex will make you laugh out loud (especially if you are a writer, are married to one, or are his realtor).
Heartburn, 1986, directed by Mike Nichols
A very very quirky film based on Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn, which, in turn, was based on her disastrous marriage with the journalist Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame), Heartburn stars Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.
Streep essays a superlative performance in this coming-of-age saga of a pregnant cookbook writer with a young daughter, comfort-cooking her way through her husband’s infidelity until, finally, things come to a head. The opposite of a romantic comedy, the genre that Ephron became so famous for subsequently, Heartburn is a unique film about love – and words.
Finding Neverland, 2004, directed by Marc Forster
This one’s the semi-biographical account of a certain period in the life of writer JM Barrie, during which he befriended a widow, Sylvia Jocelyn Llewellyn Davies (formerly Du Maurier, the aunt of Daphne Du Maurier), and her five sons – George, Jack, Peter, Michael and Nicholas. After the miserable failure of Barrie’s last play, Little Mary, his friendship with the vibrant Llewelyn Davies clan – and his relationship with Sylvia – provided him the inspiration and material for his best-known work Peter Pan or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.
A deeply moving, beautifully crafted film, starring Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet, Finding Neverland brings to life the shimmering world of children and art, edged by life and adult sorrows (the end of Barrie’s marriage, Sylvia’s cancer, the complexities of their relationship) and captures the crossings between the two that writers and children must routinely undertake to protect their inner truths. A fine film that is perfect for a wintry afternoon.
The End of the Tour, 2015, directed by James Ponsoldt
And finally, the film that occasioned this list.
Screened at Sundance this January, and released in limited theatres this July, The End of the Tour is mostly set in 1996, around a long interview with David Foster Wallace, the critically acclaimed writer whose cult novel Infinite Jest had just been published to rave reviews and instant bestsellerdom. The interview was conducted by David Lipsky, journalist for Rolling Stone magazine and author of a couple of books himself.
The film is based on Lipsky’s memoir Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace. A cerebral – according to Lev Grossman of Time, ‘the transcript of their brilliant conversations reads like a two-man Tom Stoppard play’ – yet oddly humane film, The End of the Tour has powerhouse performances from Jason Segel (once the goofy Marshall Eriksen of How I Met Your Mother, now probably on his way to Oscar glory) and Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky.
Dealing with everything from the craft of writing to success and what it means, from addictions to upper class artistic angst, and finally with love, sex and meaning, this film is the closest that can come to portraying what it is really like to be a writer – whether young or successful or old and grey.
Devapriya Roy is the author of two-and-a-half books. She has several kind-hearted friends who supply films to her, the downloading of which she is not a party to, since she, herself, is a certified techno-peasant, an upholder of copyright laws, and in any case, she believes that torrents refer to waterfalls and hydropower.
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The Hours, 2002, directed by Stephen Daldry
Based on the extraordinary eponymous novel by Michael Cunningham, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner award in 1999, The Hours is a sophisticated tribute to a novel – Mrs Dalloway – its writer, Virginia Woolf, and the curious ways in which the powerful material a classic has to offer can be transformed by another writer separated by decades to soar far and beyond its specific context (here, 1920s England) and become an account of the deep impulses of (upper-class) life and art.
1940s England: It is morning in the country, and Woolf, played by Nicole Kidman in a prosthetic nose, tells her husband Leonard that she has a first line for her new novel – ‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself’ – which surfaces, as first lines often do, between interruptions by the maid, bursts of anxiety about her sister’s impending visit, and a general if intense pining for London.
In two parallel counter-narratives set in America, and intertwined mysteriously with Woolf’s story, are a couple of memorable protagonists.
One is a pregnant suburban housewife, Mrs Brown (Julianne Moore), in a 1950s California domesticity that is crushing her soul, quite palpably, even as she bakes a cake for her husband’s birthday with her young son. The other is the chic New York book editor, Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep), who is, in 2001, throwing a party for her award-winning poet-friend dying of AIDS.
Together, three stories come together to narrate a jaggedly put-together version of a literary epic, but it’s executed with such post-modern panache that it takes your breath away.
Duplex, 2003, directed by Danny DeVito
Alex Rose (Ben Stiller) is a middlebrow novelist who is hoping to make it big with his next book. His wife, the irrepressible Nancy Kendricks (Drew Barrymore), works for a magazine. Together, they are looking high and low for a house they can co-own. A realtor (DeVito) convinces them to buy a gorgeous Brooklyn brownstone – a stunning structure, and humongous by NY standards – never mind the charming old lady who lives in the rent-controlled apartment on top and is likely to cop it soon.
Unfortunately for Alex, who has an editor breathing down his neck, the charming old lady, apparently at death’s door, changes colour almost as soon as they’ve bought the house. She turns out to be a manipulative shrew, and all hell breaks loose. A rib-tickling comedy with twists and turns in the plot, Duplex will make you laugh out loud (especially if you are a writer, are married to one, or are his realtor).
Heartburn, 1986, directed by Mike Nichols
A very very quirky film based on Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn, which, in turn, was based on her disastrous marriage with the journalist Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame), Heartburn stars Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.
Streep essays a superlative performance in this coming-of-age saga of a pregnant cookbook writer with a young daughter, comfort-cooking her way through her husband’s infidelity until, finally, things come to a head. The opposite of a romantic comedy, the genre that Ephron became so famous for subsequently, Heartburn is a unique film about love – and words.
Finding Neverland, 2004, directed by Marc Forster
This one’s the semi-biographical account of a certain period in the life of writer JM Barrie, during which he befriended a widow, Sylvia Jocelyn Llewellyn Davies (formerly Du Maurier, the aunt of Daphne Du Maurier), and her five sons – George, Jack, Peter, Michael and Nicholas. After the miserable failure of Barrie’s last play, Little Mary, his friendship with the vibrant Llewelyn Davies clan – and his relationship with Sylvia – provided him the inspiration and material for his best-known work Peter Pan or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.
A deeply moving, beautifully crafted film, starring Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet, Finding Neverland brings to life the shimmering world of children and art, edged by life and adult sorrows (the end of Barrie’s marriage, Sylvia’s cancer, the complexities of their relationship) and captures the crossings between the two that writers and children must routinely undertake to protect their inner truths. A fine film that is perfect for a wintry afternoon.
The End of the Tour, 2015, directed by James Ponsoldt
And finally, the film that occasioned this list.
Screened at Sundance this January, and released in limited theatres this July, The End of the Tour is mostly set in 1996, around a long interview with David Foster Wallace, the critically acclaimed writer whose cult novel Infinite Jest had just been published to rave reviews and instant bestsellerdom. The interview was conducted by David Lipsky, journalist for Rolling Stone magazine and author of a couple of books himself.
The film is based on Lipsky’s memoir Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace. A cerebral – according to Lev Grossman of Time, ‘the transcript of their brilliant conversations reads like a two-man Tom Stoppard play’ – yet oddly humane film, The End of the Tour has powerhouse performances from Jason Segel (once the goofy Marshall Eriksen of How I Met Your Mother, now probably on his way to Oscar glory) and Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky.
Dealing with everything from the craft of writing to success and what it means, from addictions to upper class artistic angst, and finally with love, sex and meaning, this film is the closest that can come to portraying what it is really like to be a writer – whether young or successful or old and grey.
Devapriya Roy is the author of two-and-a-half books. She has several kind-hearted friends who supply films to her, the downloading of which she is not a party to, since she, herself, is a certified techno-peasant, an upholder of copyright laws, and in any case, she believes that torrents refer to waterfalls and hydropower.
