How “The End of the Tour” Nails an Entire Profession
Whether Eisenberg is thumbing the dog-eared book of his interview subject, interleaved with Post-its, on the airplane ride to their first rendezvous; or striding through the bleak parking garage with a hold-all slung over a slumped shoulder and a rental-car key in his hand; or apologizing for pressing the on-button of his hand-held cassette recorder within moments of crossing his subject’s threshold; or ingratiatingly reassuring the subject that his answers don’t sound stupid, not at all; or nervously deflecting questions about himself with jokes about just who is interviewing whom, his delivery of the tropes and gestures of the profile-writing reporter is pitch perfect
.. The pair have internalized the argument of Janet Malcolm’s classic essay “The Journalist and the Murderer” (published in The New Yorker in 1989 and in book form a year later), which analyzes the journalist-subject interaction as a drama of seduction and betrayal. In 1996, the year in which the movie is set, there was not a single magazine journalist at work in New York City who had not read Malcolm’s essay; most of them could approximately quote its opening sentence, which reads, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”