Culture Blues

The Instant Movie Club: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Every week, your friends at Culture Blues get together to watch a movie from their Netflix Instant queue. Then, they gather around a steel table in a sparsely decorated room and discuss it. This is The Instant Movie Club.

This week, we’ll be discussing Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, John Krasinski's adaptation of David Foster Wallace.

Next Week: Angels & Demons. Here at Culture Blues we are huge fans of two things: Tom Hanks and Dan Brown. We can't wait to see how their latest cryptic romp turns out.

Thankfully, they don't all look like this

Jeff: I was one of the 3,000 people that saw Brief Interviews with Hideous Men during its short theatrical run last fall. I’d actually intended to review it for this website but never got around to it, likely because I just wasn’t sure what to write about (read: laziness). Selecting Brief Interviews for the IMC finally affords me the opportunity to gather my thoughts on a movie that I really enjoy, but also recognize as incredibly uneven, pretentious, and ultimately inaccessible.

In case you’re not familiar with the source material, Brief Interviews is based on a David Foster Wallace book of the same name. Wallace’s book is basically a collection of short stories, although I’d apply that term very loosely as every piece is better described as a monologue, ones wrought with digressions and also littered with academic mumbo-jumbo. The book doesn’t have an overarching plot – there is no plucky feminist grad student, or if there is, we never see her. It’s a fascinating book that forces the reader to really engage with the Hideous Men, to act as the interviewer, puzzling through their bullshit to get at the truth of their stories – if there even is any.

Before director John “Big Tuna” Krasinski came along, I would’ve described DFW’s book as impossible to adapt. The success of Krasinski’s adaptation is certainly up for debate, but I feel he does about as good a job as humanly possible. Sure, the monologues are considerably distilled (some of my favorites were cut altogether), but the actors come up huge for Krasinski (Top Three:  Josh Charles, Frankie Faison, Bobby Cannavale), and his visual flourishes, while sometimes distracting and unnecessary, at least keep the eye stimulated. At only 80 minutes, I’d say Brief Interviews is definitely worth the time investment, even if you only enjoy half of the monologues.

Despite finding Brief Interviews very entertaining, I still can’t help wondering just what Krasinski was going for. He’s whittled the interviews down to the point where the prevailing themes are “men are shit” and “relationships are doomed.” I always thought DFW’s message was a lot more nuanced than that, but perhaps it’s unfair to compare the two when only Krasinski is working within the constraints of film. I do wonder what Halpert expected us to take away from his plotless, meandering, often antagonistic 80 minutes. It had to be something, right? As much as I enjoy the film, and that’s largely because of the performances, something about it still rings hollow for me, especially when compared (unfairly) to the book.

Christopher Meloni is always involved in some weird sex stuff

Jeremiah: I agree with most everything Jeff says. The degree of difficulty on this adaptation is through the roof. The fact that Krasinski was able to craft a film that works as well as this one does could be seen as a major success. However, if you are going to judge the film strictly on its own merits (something I can’t even completely do because I read the book before seeing the movie), then I’m not sure it really works as a film.

Despite the structure Krasinski has added, and possible overall themes (which I’ll get to later), this is still really just a showcase for the individual interviews. Frankie Faison’s is simply excellent. It could work all on its own as a short film, especially since the content differentiates it from the other interviews, almost all of which deal solely with male/female interactions. Faison confronts his bathroom attendant father across the years in a poignant and quietly epic scene. His father expresses pride in providing a service, doing a job well and, most importantly, earning a living and providing for his family, while Faison expresses shame, anger and possibly even contempt for a man who could find pride in such a job. This is the one instance where I feel Krasinksi really outdid the source material.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention Josh Charles’ scene in which he divulges his “history with relationships” to multiple women and basically paves the road for his inevitable exit. It’s a funny showcase for Charles’ limitless talents, and the second best of the interviews.

Despite the title, and the gender of the interviewees, I like to think of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, the book and the movie, as about humans in general rather than just men. In the case of the movie, I see the thesis more along the lines of “people are always motivated by self interest” rather than “men are shit.” To many, those may seem like nearly identical statements, but if someone does charitable work simply because they get a charge from the ideas of helping others or martyring themselves, well they’re still doing good.

There is plenty of ugliness on display here, and maybe I’m just being taken in by the somewhat lighthearted manner in which most of it is presented, but I think the final interview, featuring Krasinski himself, supports this. I thought that Krasinski’s performance here missed the mark by a bit, but this particular interview provides as good a capper as any. The woman in the story feels and conveys genuine compassion for the man who abducts and rapes her, all in the hopes that he will ultimately spare her life. Likewise, Krasinski’s character undergoes a profound change of opinion about the woman, but only because of some notion that she can save him. As a movie, Brief Interviews certainly is “uneven, pretentious, and ultimately inaccessible,” but I also think it does an admirable, if far from perfect, job of distilling Wallace’s work into 80 relatively breezy minutes on the silver screen.

"Maybe I should have told you this before you moved out here..."

Jeff: I love how a movie that ends with two monologues about rape was just described as "relatively breezy." Breezy works, though. Even during the penultimate monologue about how rape or, say, the Holocaust, can actually be positively transformative experiences.

I'm glad Jeremiah brought up Krasiniski's closing monologue. I remember after seeing Brief Interviews for the first time what a misstep I thought it was, that Krasinski had horribly botched the film's climax (if you can call it that). There's an episode of The Office where Pam jokes that Jim doesn't yell, that he can't really get mad. It seems that applies to Krasinski as an actor as well, who seems horribly strained in trying to extend his range beyond comic and charming.

On the second viewing, I wasn't nearly as disappointed in Krasiniski's monologue. Sure, the parts at the end where he's speaking directly to the interviewer are cringeworthy - it's got to be the all time most limp delivery of "you bitch" - but I settled into his tale of the granola crunching rape victim more than the first time and even felt moved by his teary-eyed sincere "She can save me" bit.

Krasinski seems like a smart guy. He managed to wring a solid film out of an impossible book. He did an epic job casting the thing. So why not save one of the more comedic monologues for himself and give the show-ending rapeologue to someone that could really knock it out of the park? Is this just a lack of self awareness? Hubris? Or did he feel that after managing to adapt DFW, he should get to do whatever the hell monologue he wanted to? If that's the answer, I can't say I really disagree with his decision.

Did you pick up on a central theme in Krasinski's adaptation or is it just a collection unrelated monologues? Did Krasinksi nail his interview or waste the good will he'd earned so far? Let us know in the comments.

Next week: Angels & Demons