FloodClearwater

David Foster Wallace is our James Joyce.

That he is prematurely deceased does not change the analogy one iota.

Disagree? You're welcome to. Now go back to your unfinished Bernard Cornwell book.

In this film James Ponsoldt creates a visually arresting depiction of what the writer David Lipsky probably imagined would be a kind of Kerouacian vision quest, a location assignment from Rolling- Freaking-Stone to profile and deep-interview David Foster Wallace, as Infinite Jest was being widely released.

In the event, Wallace did not have all that much to say to Lipsky. You can tell this from Lipsky's book this film is based on, and from the spare but serviceable adapted screenplay by Donald Margulies.

Wallace was one of those writers who puts all of the magic into the book. You know his mind by reading him, he didn't hold back a secret reserve of amazingness for cocktail parties or all-night bro sessions.

So, in this one aspect, it is a small miracle that Lipsky's book about interviewing Wallace one time found an audience. It speaks more to the cult and fandom around Wallace than anything else.

And the book demanded uninspiring and slovenly scenery for the film. Wallace's clap-trap bachelor lit professor house. Lipsky's dusty, snow-covered rental car. A long boulevard of fast food signs and CASH-PAWN stores that really was the great writer's daily commute, which he slyly paid homage to in the now-famous transcribed speech "This is water."

So, as great as David Foster Wallace is as an author of Great American Novels, this film was a tall order for the director. But he nails it. Each horizon, each focal length, each pan and zoom, each bit of arranged light and shadow is pitch perfect.

James Ponsoldt also should be credited for gamely managing two great young actors here in the lead roles of Wallace (Jason Segel) and Lipsky (a delightfully nebbished Jesse Eisenberg).

Both actors shine by drawing out the vulnerabilities of the men inhabiting the roles of Wallace (lauded literary hero haunted by questions of self-credibility and creeping depression) and Lipsky (quasi-failed lit author struggling with the ego blow brought on by writing about the real thing). The eye and face work that Mr. Segel, in particular, pulls off portraying DFW is fantastic, and Ponsoldt gets every bit of it from the proper angle for our enjoyment.

The End of the Tour is not a profound, messaged, or even particularly moving film. Recall the fundamental limitation of a pilgrimage to an oracle who does not really open up and convey wisdom.

It is rather a historical reenactment of a piece of contemporary literary history portrayed by two very fine actors and directed by a very fine director in James Ponsoldt.

John Le Carre stories are subtle, tissuey things.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy requires re-reading the book, and rewinding in mid-film, to catch key plot developments.

The Russia House is, in this vein, a classic Le Carre yarn, co- adapted to the screen by Le Carre and the talented Tom Stoppard.

The film is produced and directed by Australian filmmaker Fred Schipisi, notable for the excellent and psychodynamic Six Degrees of Separation and the fulsomely enjoyable Roxanne. Schipisi's direction and production values are this film's weakest points, the framed shots from the start look amateurishly ungainly, ill-framed, and ill-cut. The director's only saving perhaps was the decision to allow jazz man Branford Marsalis to score the film, with mostly lilting haunts of soprano sax melodies.

The story centers on a Brit, played by Sean Connery, and a Russian, played by Michele Pfeiffer. It is 1990, and glasnost has been declared.

Connery's leading man, "Barley" Blair, is a Russophilic book editor fond of extended stays in grey Moscow. Pfeiffer's co-lead, Katya, is a Russian of almost anonymous identity beyond the familiar tropes.

Katya has a friend who programs Russia's nukes, the friend wants Russia's secrets out, and Katya is recruited to vouchsafe them as written down to Barley, this westerner with a kind soul and an avowed commitment to humanism.

Let's start with the biggest and best part of the film, Connery. His Barley is a glorious, ruined shambles. A gentle, aging hedonist, who looks, stealing a line from the film "like an unmade bed with a shopping bag attached." Connery is entertaining and engaging in every frame, truly inhabiting Barley as an original character.

Pfeiffer is very good, if not at her best as the Russian woman beholden by secrets and restrained by crippling caution. Her Russian-tinted accent is querulous in the first minutes of the film, but by the midpoint she achieves--and she may do it with her cheekbones as much as her diction, it all counts--believability as a Russian person.

The other great strength The Russia House has, which has sustained the film as watchable and re-watchable over time, is the large supporting cast of male actors portraying the MI6 and CIA spooks who Barley haphazardly encounters, and very quickly takes direction from. James Fox, Roy Scheider, John Mahoney, Michael Kitchen and an almost SNL-flamboyant Ian McNeice (as the riotously out-of-place Merrydew) provide a fantastical espionage-ical Greek chorus that set off Connery's ethical and emotional contretemps.

The film's final potent ingredient is a solo supporting performance by Klaus Maria Brandauer as "(code name) Dante," a mysterious Russian who seems to be behind the searching questions the men in grey directing Barley seem to have.

The Russia House is neither the best wrought Le Carre story on film, nor the best "Russia film" depicting the second cold war era of the 1980s. It would take a quick undercard to The Hunt for Red October. It would lose in a close decision to Gorky Park.

But Connery as Barley above all is worth the ticket, which leaves the film in the category of "worthy," even with the producer/director's foibles set against it.