Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		2.5

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men Blu-ray Movie Review

Is John Krasinski's adaptation an infinite jest?

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater March 20, 2010

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is the very definition of a passion project. Director John Krasinski, best known as Jim Halpert, the smirking, tousle-haired protag of the U.S. version of The Office, first encountered David Foster Wallace’s collection of short stories while performing in a stage version at Brown University. According to Krasinski, the experience moved him to take a serious stab at acting—jumpstarting his career—and it also gave him the impetus to spend years tinkering with a screenplay of Wallace’s mordant probing of the male psyche. With the industry cred provided by his day job, funding for Krasinski’s pet project eventually materialized, and he set about bringing Wallace’s dense, academic prose to the screen, attempting to film what many considered unfilmable. Literary adaptations are a thankless task—it almost goes without saying that the book is always so much better than the movie—so Krasinski’s earnestness about the material is admirable, even if his execution is off, which, unfortunately, is the case here. With its circuitous, self-conscious, and thematically vague philosophizing, Krasinski’s directorial debut feels like an unfocused essay by an author unsure of his theme. And that’s something that you can rarely say about Wallace’s work, even at its most meandering.

One of the film's many hideous men...

Wallace’s 23-tale collection is defined by—and titled after—four short stories all called “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.” Structured as Q&A sessions—though the questions are left blank and we’re never implicitly told why the interviews are taking place—the stories feature male subjects confessing and elaborating upon their bizarre sexual fetishes and childhood fantasies, detailing their struggles with impotence, and generally revealing outright misogyny, or, at least, a flailing misunderstanding of what it is that women want. To give the interviews context and to structure his film with something resembling a narrative, Krasinski invents a backstory for Wallace’s anonymous interviewer. Here, she’s Sara Quinn (Julianne Nicholson), a grad student and TA conducting research for her thesis about the feminist movement’s effect on men. I know—original topic, right? I’m not sure why her advisor, Professor Adams (Timothy Hutton), signed off on that one, but Sara has an ulterior motive: to figure out how her ex— played by Krasinski, self-cast against his usual loving boyfriend type—was capable of wronging her with such callous disregard. The film skips through time, intercutting brief snatches of Sara’s life —parties, arguments, furtive glances—with the interviews she conducts with her research subjects.

Most of the interviews take place in a concrete cell of a room—presumably some kind of collegiate, sub-library academic dungeon—making the subjects look like suspects in a police interrogation. It’s fitting, as there are few innocents here. All of the “hideous men” are guilty in some sense, whether in be in their attitudes toward women or in the repression of their own identities. SNL funnyman Will Forte plays a clearly gay man trying desperately to stay in the closet. Bobby Cannavale is an amputee who uses his stub of an arm as an “asset” to get sex. Ben Shenkman is an awkwardly neurotic, Woody Allen sort who inexplicably shouts “Victory to the forces of democratic freedom!” whenever he climaxes. There’s humor here, of course, especially in the first half of the film, and the actors are uniformly well-suited for their roles, but as more and more of the subjects come off as mere creeps, losers, and deviants, the film sags under all the tired, backhanded male bashing. One of the characters readily admits that “most men are shits,” and while I don’t think that that’s the point Krasinski—or Wallace—is trying to make, it is the sentiment in which the film is soaked. Forget battle of the sexes, Brief Interviews is a one-sided skirmish with us hideous men in the crosshairs.

Though they’re targets for our disgust and disbelief, Sara’s male research specimens are hardly the subjects of the film. Oddly enough, considering how completely invisible the interviewer is in Wallace’s stories, Krasinski opts to make Sara the central focus. “Watch the documenter, not the documented,” says Professor Adams before dimming the lights to show Nanook of the North to his class of undergrads, but this actually seems to be Krasinski’s code for pay attention to Sara, not the men she’s cross-examining. One of the film’s many hazy, undeveloped themes is how our perceptions are altered by our personal experiences, as scenes from Sara’s recent heartbreak intrude into the men’s monologues in sudden, jarring cuts. (Krasinski’s editorial style seems to favor jump cuts.) The problem here is that Sara simply isn’t a compelling character at all. She spends half of the movie looking at her subjects with a clinical stare, and the other half crying quietly. So now we have two sets of stereotypes: men as sex- obsessed pigs, and women as cold, fragile beings, given to weepiness.

What few true detractors of Wallace’s fiction there are may say that it’s too dense and overwrought with linguistic pyrotechnics—the copious multi-page footnotes, the endlessly strung together clauses—but none would ever claim that his work is as thematically shallow as this cinematic version of Brief Interviews, which doesn’t seem to know what exactly it wants to say, but talks ceaselessly about everything and nothing. The film keeps the literary artifice of Wallace’s dialogue—which works with authorial license on the page, but seems polysyllabically marble- mouthed when spoken onscreen by a Greek chorus of two waiters at a posh party—but it ditches the psychological astuteness with which he treats his characters. We’re left, then, with an emotional and intellectual vacancy, with a wounded woman interviewing a succession of meat- headed men and not really coming to any conclusions outside of a late in the game realization of how empathy works in the male mind. It’s Wallace-lite, which is essentially no Wallace at all.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Brief Interviews arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of IFC with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer—in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio—that has a few shortcomings, but looks far less hideous, let's say, than the psyches of the film's interviewees. One thing I noticed frequently was a small jitter in the image. Whether it's telecine wobble or camera shake is hard to tell, but it's apparent enough to be distracting at times. The film also appears to have undergone some minor filtering to remove noise, though there's none of the smeary, plasticine quality that you'd get with an outright DNR hackjob. It's somewhat inconsistent. There are a few scenes where grain isn't apparent at all, and others where it looks fairly natural. The end result is a picture that's a bit soft, lacking the fine high definition detail you'd expect from a contemporary film, regardless of its budget. Still, Hideous Men is an acceptable, if never wowing experience on Blu-ray. The film's strictly realistic color palette is reproduced well, black levels are adequately deep, and there's little in the way of compression artifacts or other analog-to-digital related issues.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track is just as restrained as its visuals, but, come on, you didn't really expect sonic fireworks from a David Foster Wallace adaptation, did you? There's not much to justify this being a multi-channel track at all, but I appreciate the quiet ambience that's occasionally trickled out in the rears during bar scenes and party sequences. The track also gets the acoustics of each space right—the concrete walls of the bunker-like interview room carry a slight reverb, and the sound inside Sara's apartment and Professor Adams' office is appropriately flatter due to the clutter of books, carpet, furniture, etc. The jazzy score mellows out with rotund upright bass and sandpapery brushes on a tight snare drum, giving the otherwise quiet track some much needed heft and presence. Finally, as you'd hope from a film brimming with monologues, dialogue is easily understandable. Overall, this a front and center, voice and score-centric track that doesn't leave much of an impression, but definitely gets the job done.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Interview with John Krasinski (SD, 6:32)
In this brief interview at Sundance, obviously non-hideous man John Krasinski discusses the origins of the project, how he got the rights to Wallace's book, and what he learned from his directorial debut.

Behind the Scenes (SD, 7:25)
Just about every actor in the film shows up here to say a few words about the script, their character, and John Krazinski, all intercut with on-set B-roll footage.

TV Spot (SD, 00:32)

Trailer (1080p, 1:46)

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Sometimes the page should stay on the page, as the very elements that make Wallace's prose incisive turn Krasinski's screen adaptation of Brief Interviews into a stilted procession of unnaturally worded monologues. Let's just hope that Krasinski doesn't turn his attentions now toward a 20-hour, HBO mini-series treatment of the 1000+ page Infinite Jest. Fans of the late David Foster Wallace may want to take a look at Brief Interviews, if only out of curiosity, but a rental should suffice for most.