Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

“Judge me, you bitch!” yells Test Subject #20 at the female protagonist of “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.” Played earnestly by John Krasinski—who also directs the movie—Test Subject #20 (real name: Ryan) is just one of many confused and impetuous males to find themselves uncomfortably put on the spot by Ivy League graduate student named Sara. Krasinski’s eponymous adaptation of a 1999 short story collection by the late David Foster Wallace takes the blunt emotional starkness of the written interviews and puts them into motion on the screen in such a way that the audience can’t help but feel directly addressed by each subject. The film—a short 80-minute affair made up of strung-together interview segments—doesn’t hold very well as a narrative in its own right, but it does an elegant and powerful job of conveying the central themes of Wallace’s work: the immediacy of existence and the pure moment of visceral human reaction.

Best known for playing affable Jim Halpert on NBC’s “The Office,” Krasinski tackled one of his favorite works for his directorial debut. In adapting “Interviews” for the screen, he returns to his college roots as an English major and playwright at Brown University. Wallace’s unnamed interviewer is here given a distinct collegiate identity as Sara Quinn (an icy Julianne Nicholson), who hopes to investigate “the social effects of the post-feminist era” by conducting and recording interviews with male test subjects in a stark, white-bricked basement room. Sara is a reserved, turtlenecked brunette with closely cropped hair and a voice recorder that never leaves her side. Still shell-shocked from a brutal break-up with Ryan, she conducts these interviews as a partially academic, but mainly personal, investigation into the male psyche.

The movie’s opening scenes give the impression that Krasinski has filtered Wallace’s prose through a sieve that seems oddly like one of romantic comedy. “Modern woman is a mess of contradictions,” one student remarks to another. “That makes it so hard to know what they want.” Statements along these lines abound in this highly verbal film, but the interview segments go far beyond a women-are-from-Venus approach in unfolding the fragility of both genders in their relationships. When describing why he fell in love with his wife, Sara’s boss, Professor Adams (Timothy Hutton), asks, “Do you think this sounds shallow? People’s real reasons?” Indeed, the reasons most test subjects give for justifying how they act toward others highlights the absurdity, cruelty and vulnerability of humans in their dealings with one another.

The beauty of “Interviews” is the ease with which Krasinski’s cast makes Wallace’s almost untouched text spring to life, highlighting the rhythm of the short stories and giving each narrator a distinctive personality. One scene which occurs outside the interview room involves a conversation between two businessmen, which perfectly tunes Wallace’s prose to their bitten-off speech patterns. Test Subject #3 (Christopher Meloni) brings a bitterly funny tale to life when he launches into the colorful story of seeing a girl crying on the ground at Dayton airport “bent over so you can, you know, just about see her tits. Totally hysterical and with the waterworks and all like that there.”

In a clever cinematographic twist, Meloni reenacts the flashback while narrating. His buddy joins him and they stand over the bawling girl with coffee cups in hand, casually observing her breakdown. Meloni narrates over the entire sequence, explaining that the girl was waiting for a man who never came; in another elegant shot, the film cuts back to her waving goodbye to her lover as he ascends the airport escalator, Meloni and his companion descending the parallel escalator, still talking, just moments later. Far from being merely a gimmick, this technique highlights the implicit interactivity of the interviews—not only between interviewer and subject but between the subject and the different people he recalls in his attempt to capture a particular emotional moment.

The film functions best as a set of such fragmented moments; Krasinski’s original plotline involving Sara remains the movie’s most bland and least convincing device. Scenes that show Sara in class, at professors’ cocktail parties, or in cafés with her friends, have a TV-show quality to them; they remain vignettes without developing her character and only tenuously tie the interviews together into a coherent narrative arc.

In a film otherwise focused on personal testimonies and confessions, her blankness seems to stem out of banal grievances. Her Krasinski-scripted loneliness does not have the same stark impact as that of her friend Harry (Benjamin Gibbard of “Death Cab for Cutie”), who uses Wallace’s words to confess the way he feels when his girlfriend is about to climax during sex: “This moment has this piercing sadness to it—of the loss of her eyes. I become like an intruder.”

The emphasis on blindness and seeing is on target; Sara, like the audience, is a witness—always emotionally interacting with the world she is watching. Reacting is human; when Ryan erupts and shouts “Judge me!” he is not only demanding but acknowledging the power of natural human behavior to utterly devastate. In Krasinski’s film, as in Wallace’s prose, no man or woman is left spared.