Review of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009) by Melanie C — 26 Jan 2010

I know this statement is coming about 60 years prematurely from me, and I don't have the Friar Tuck ring of grey or coke-bottle myopia-fixers to sell it, but, Grandson, books are a goddamn helluva lot better than their movie counterparts, more often than not.

The core problem with Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is its dialogue. Although clearly adapted with love, admiration, and fidelity by John Krasinski, the dialogue feels tenably weighty and novelistic in almost all of the film's fractured-narrative monologues. It feels as if the interviewees are just reciting another man's words while desperately trying to sound like they are their own, mostly because they all are. Only a few of the monologues actually break through the veneer of artifice that the distinctly Wallace-esque dialogue creates, most notably Frankie Faison's tale of his father's job as a bathroom attendant and John Krasinski's final monologue. But even within these moments of transcendence, there are still parts within the same monologue which distance the viewer, because of the prosy quality of the words spoken.

One must acknowledge Krasinski's ambition for choosing the hyper-cerebral DFW as his first film's subject matter, but the film expectedly does not capture on the screen what DFW has on the page. And as a devout Foster Wallacite, I wonder if it would have been better left untouched by an unfulfilling filmic version. I only wish Krasinski could have wondered the same.

Addendum: The film also botched one of the book's most powerful interviews, about the freeing quality of being subject to man's darkest whims and surviving, by ending on an awkward note and letting distracting guitar-scratching and jumpy editing take away from the monologue itself. I get what Krasinski tried to do, but the monologue would have been much more affecting with a simple close up and letting the actor do his work.