BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN

Brute honesty

By CARA BAYLES

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If you've read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (or anything by the late great David Foster Wallace), it's hard to imagine anything cinematic in its diatribes annotated by pages of footnotes. But writer/director/actor John Krasinski (aka Jim from The Office) somehow managed.

"I look back and sometimes think what a stupid thing it was to try to do it," says Krasinski during an interview set up with the in-vain intent to make me swoon. "The truth is that this adaptation will always be a fraction of the imagination inspired by his book. [Wallace is] just, in my opinion, one of the greatest writers we've ever had. The hardest part was editing."

In the book, the "interviews" are broken up by the letter "Q," but we aren't privy to the implied questions. Krasinski centers his film around Sara (Julianne Nicholson), a graduate student interviewing modern men in a "post-feminist" world for her dissertation ... and her personal illumination. Revealing monologues pop up everywhere—in her apartment building, a conversation with her professor—so Sara's always wearing her clinical game face. She's almost as difficult to read as the book's "Q"s—even during the film's climactic moment with her ex.

"When you're almost dying for this woman to fight back and she doesn't, it could be somewhat disappointing for the audience," Kransinki admits. "The realization that I hope you take away from it is this male desire to be overpowering and win every battle that they go into is sort of a fruitless venture. She sees how selfish this guy is. Her silence is her understanding that she's won."

As annoying as those "read-it-first" types are, knowing Krasinski's source material helps to truly appreciate what he's done here. In one of the book's monologues, a man describes his father's job as a bathroom attendant. In the film, the basement room where Sara conducts her interviews opens up behind the speaker. His spiel becomes a dialogue between him and his father, in the opulent bathroom with Sara in the background, gazing over the man's shoulder into the psychological landscape.

At times, you wonder if this isn't set in some alternate universe where everyone is painfully shallow, psychoanalytical and defensive (well, it is set on a college campus). Wallace used his characters as a vehicle to drive toward the conceptual, and the interview subjects investigate their shallow, despicable behavior with a harrowing (at times nauseating) honesty. The film's fantastically acted, and the more cinematic scenes are well-constructed, but you'll have to adjust your narrative expectations. It moves slowly ... if at all (probably because Krasinski's so devoted to Wallace's prose), and the transitions are psychological, not chronological.

The acting alone is worth the price of admission, but the plot also creeps up on you as a subtle epiphany. The cumulative effect of the scenes is a portrait of the ugly underbelly of modern masculinity. Both the film and the book toss around the phrase "post-feminist," but neither is polemic. "Feminism was a huge challenge that I think was totally necessary, not only for women, but for men. I think that this idea of not ever being able to be vulnerable, never giving any sort of credit or due to a woman is incredibly unhealthy for men as well," Krasinski says. "These insecurities and misunderstandings are what's behind so many decisions that we make."

OK, maybe I swooned a little.

FOR MORE SWOONERRIFIC KRASINSKI, HEAD TO WEEKLYDIG.COM.

BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN
RATED | NR
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