Consider the Writer
Trying for tribute, John Krasinski makes a mess of David Foster WallaceNs Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
“Everything I write ends up being about loneliness,” said the late writer David Foster Wallace in a 1999 interview on the radio show Bookworm. In that conversation, Wallace was trying to get at the core of his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, a four-part short story he wrote as a series of monologues, which, in turn, are presented as a transcription of interviews that an unnamed woman conducted with dozens of men. In a dizzying whirl of language, WallaceNs fictional men explain how they feel about the women theyNve loved or, more often than not, have failed to love.
The 29-year-old actor John Krasinski reports that participating in a staged reading of WallaceNs story while a Brown University student inspired him to pursue acting as a profession. In the years since, as he rose to fame on The Office, he developed the stories as a feature, which he would write and direct. The resulting film has clearly been made with a deep reverence for Wallace, who was surely the most gifted writer of his generation and who took his own life one year ago this month, at age 46. All of which makes it even more painful to say that, as a film, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is a disaster.
In his crazily ambitious adaptation, Krasinski has brought to life the female interviewer, who is invisible in WallaceNs stories. Onscreen, she has become Sara (Julianne Nicholson), a New York grad student who asks the men around her to speak about their relationships with women. At first, the talks take place in a bunker-like room, with the men sitting at a table in front of an ugly concrete wall. Krasinski begins with Subject No. 14 (Ben Shenkman), who has a goofy sexual problem. He is followed by one other (a funny Michael Cerveris as a blue-collar worker with performance issues), and then, as if he canNt stand the idea of staring at that bleak gray wall for the length of a film (an 80-minute one, at that), Krasinski sends Sara out into the world, where men at restaurants, parties and theaters begin telling their stories, sometimes to her face, sometimes not.
The effect is distractingly theatrical—and confusing. Sara leaves her apartment and passes a man (Will Arnett) in the hallway, who is delivering a monologue about abandonment through the closed door of his girlfriendNs apartment. ThatNs a clever enough idea on paper, perhaps, but the setup ends up undercutting the message—his words donNt land. Later, in a coffeehouse, Sara listens from two tables away as a businessman (Christopher Meloni) tells his friend (Denis ONHare) about an odd, Cheever-esque encounter he had with a newly jilted, hysterically crying woman in an airport. Ever in search of a way to open up the film, Krasinski cuts away to a poorly executed flashback of the encounter, set to MeloniNs voiceover. Again, excess staging overwhelms content, and all is lost.
ItNs easy to see why actors would be drawn to WallaceNs Hideous Men monologues: TheyNre funny, profane, often scarily intense and, at all times, deeply emotional. Yet Wallace was not writing a play. He was writing fiction. For the page. And so the plot specifics of each manNs story—the who, what and where—are secondary to the clutter of language with which the men surround their testimony. Wallace used language—often ornately academic—as a kind of protective padding for his interviewees, and the reader, at his own pace, must dig deep to find the essential truths.
Filmmakers, even great ones, are always battling the clock, a dilemma that left Krasinski little choice but to cut each monologue down to its core events. The stilted storytelling that results often rings false, and in the end, the monologues—delivered by some very good actors (Timothy Hutton, Bobby Cannavale, Josh Charles) who come across as first-year theater students acting out scenes from their favorite novels—donNt add up to much. If Krasinski had an overarching theme in mind—be it the loneliness that Wallace spoke of, or something else—weNre not getting it. And whatever it was about Hideous Men that so deeply affected Krasinski the college student has been lost in translation.
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men was written and directed by John Krasinski, based on the book by David Foster Wallace; and stars Julianne Nicholson, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Cerveris, Timothy Hutton, John Krasinski, Christopher Meloni, Ben Shenkman and Josh Charles. Not rated. In select theaters.
