Brief Interviews with Hideous Men Blu-ray offers solid video and audio, but overall it's a mediocre Blu-ray release
After her boyfriend mysteriously leaves her with little explanation, grad student Sara Quinn is left looking for
answers as to what went wrong. Directing all her energies into her anthropological dissertation, Sara conducts a
series of interviews with men in an effort to uncover the secret thoughts that drive their behavior. As she records
the astonishing and disquieting experiences of various subjects, Sara discovers much more about men and
herself than she bargained for.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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