Brief Interviews with Hideous Men - Movie Review

I really wanted to like Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I like John Krasinski, who adapted David Foster Wallace's book and directed this adaptation. I like at least half of the actors (only two or three people have more than five minutes of screen time, so it's difficult to really describe anyone as a "lead" or "main" ). I like seeing popular actors succeed as writers and directors.

In short, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a prime example of being too faithful to one's source material. I've never read David Foster Wallace's collection of short stories on which this is based, but half of the movie feels like writing, rather than speaking. Everything is too eloquent. Too well put together.

The story centers around Sara (Julianne Nicholson) who has recently broken up with her boyfriend (John Krasinski), and has decided to conduct a series of interviews with men to find out what they really think about relationships/women/etc, and compile all of these interviews into (I believe) her graduate dissertation.

Most of the film centers around these interviews, with the overarching story seemingly composed of scenes whose only purpose is to make Brief Interviews with Hideous Men seem like an actual movie and not just a collection of monologues. Krasinski's direction is competent, if unspectacular. The clips are edited together in a way that is occasionally riveting, but often distracting and confusing.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, however, will be judged a success or a failure based on how well entertaining the individual interviews play out. Unfortunately, only a couple of these interviews is actually entertaining and most either fall flat or are, at worst, plain awful.

Let's start with the good: Josh Charles plays a man who has his break-up speech down to a tee, able to recite it verbatim to multiple women and to the interviewer. Frankie Faison plays a man who reminisces about his dad, who degraded himself as an African-American bathroom attendant for rich white men in order to support his family. Dominic Cooper gives a gut wrenching interview that is, in a way, neutered by sloppy editing, yet still remains a highlight.

Unfortunately, the rest of the interviews are pretty forgettable. Christopher Meloni gives a rambling, misogynistic rambling in a coffee shop that goes on for minutes without actually going anywhere. Ben Gibbard, the lead singer of Death Cab for Cutie, is awkward and shows some limited promise as an actor, but his interview was so forgettable that I can't remember anything about it, and the potential he shows is relegated to just that: potential.

Then there's the interview that John Krasinki's character has with Sara. First off, it's conducted as a soul-bearing "why I broke up with you" speech, and not a formal interview like most of the others. Secondly, it's horrible. Absolutely, undeniably awful. Of all the interviews, it's the one that sounds the most like literature and the least like something someone would say off-the-cuff. Krasinki also does the speech no favors by sounding like he's reading it from a page. Hell, it probably would've come across better if he had been sitting, reading this off a sheet a paper, rather than selling it as an actual conversational monologue.

And then it's over. Clocking in at eighty minutes, perhaps the best thing I can say about Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is that it has a very informative title. The men in this movie are, for the most part, hideous, and it is, thankfully, brief. The question now, is: Why was this even made in the first place?

Score: 2 (out of 5) stars