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review: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

BRIEF INTERVIEW WITH HIDEOUS MEN

"Everything I write ends up being about loneliness," said the late writer David Foster Wallace in a 1999 interview on the radio show "Bookworm." In that conversation, Wallace was trying to get at the core of his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, a four-part short story he wrote as a series of monologues, which, in turn, are presented as a transcription of interviews that an unnamed woman conducted with dozens of men. In a dizzying whirl of language, Wallace's fictional men explain how they feel about the women they've loved or, more often than not, have failed to love.

The 29-year-old actor John Krasinski reports that participating in a staged reading of Wallace's story while a Brown University student inspired him to pursue acting as a profession. In the years since, as he rose to fame in The Office, he has been developing the stories as a feature, which he would write and direct. The resulting film has clearly been made with a deep reverence for Wallace, who was surely the most gifted writer of his generation, and who took his own life one year ago this month, at age 46. All of which makes it even more painful to say that, as a film, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is a disaster.

In his crazily ambitious adaptation, Krasinski has brought to life the female interviewer, who is invisible in Wallace's stories. On-screen, she has become Sara (Julianne Nicholson), a New York grad student who asks the men around her to speak about their relationships with women. At first, the talks take place in a bunker-like room, with the men sitting at a table in front of an ugly concrete wall. Krasinski begins with Subject #14 (Ben Shenkman), who has a goofy sexual problem. He is followed by one other (a funny Michael Cerveris as a blue-collar worker with performance issues), and then, as if he can't stand the idea of staring at that bleak gray wall for the length of a film (an 80-minute one, at that), Krasinski sends Sara out into the world, where men at restaurants, parties, and theaters begin telling their stories, sometimes to her face, sometimes not.

The effect is distractingly theatrical—and confusing. Sara leaves her apartment and passes a man (Will Arnett) in the hallway, who is delivering a monologue about abandonment through the closed door of his girlfriend's apartment. That's a clever enough idea on paper, perhaps, but the setup ends up undercutting the message—his words don't land. Later, in a coffeehouse, Sara listens from two tables away as a businessman (Christopher Meloni) tells his friend (Denis O'Hare) about an odd, Cheever-esque encounter he had with a newly jilted, hysterically crying woman in an airport. Ever in search of a way to open up the film, Krasinski cuts away to a poorly executed flashback of the encounter, set to Meloni's voiceover. Again, excess staging overwhelms content, and all is lost.

It's easy to see why actors would be drawn to Wallace's Hideous Men monologues: They're funny, profane, often scarily intense, and, at all times, deeply emotional. Yet, Wallace was not writing a play. He was writing fiction. For the page. And so the plot specifics of each man's story—the who, what, and where—are secondary to the clutter of language with which the men surround their testimony. Wallace used language—often ornately academic—as a kind of protective padding for his interviewees, and the reader, at his own pace, must dig deep to find the essential truths.

Filmmakers, even great ones, are always battling the clock, a dilemma that left Krasinski little choice but to cut each monologue down to its core events. The stilted storytelling that results often rings false, and in the end, the monologues—delivered by some very good actors (Timothy Hutton, Bobby Cannavale, Josh Charles), who come across as first-year theater students acting out scenes from their favorite novels—don't add up to much. If Krasinski had an overarching theme in mind—be it the loneliness that Wallace spoke of, or something else—we're not getting it. And whatever it was about Hideous Men that so deeply affected Krasinski the college student has been lost in translation. (Chuck Wilson)

 

review: "Whiteout" (from LA Weekly/Village Voice)

WHITEOUT

In this earnest but muddled Antarctic thriller, a masked man kills research scientists who may have stumbled upon a valuable object hidden beneath the ice. Figuring out the murderer’s identity falls to U.S. Marshall Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale), with help from the research station’s doctor (Tom Skerritt) and a shady U.N. investigator (Gabriel Macht). Carrie is a good detective tortured by memories of a Miami drug bust gone bad, and in a regrettable blunder, director Dominic Sena (Kalifornia, Gone in 60 Seconds) and his four credited screenwriters have chosen to stage that failed arrest in a series of hokey flashbacks that always end with Sena cutting back to a zoned-out Carrie, who literally shakes her head to clear away the bad vibes. One feels for Beckinsale, a B-movie action queen badly in need of a comedy and a script that doesn’t require, as this one does, that she strip down to her skivvies in the opening scene. It could be said that Whiteout is an honest attempt to set an old-fashioned whodunit in an exotic locale, but the mystery at the film’s core is so hopelessly dull that one begins to long for a third-act cameo by the Abominable Snowman. (Chuck Wilson)

ARMY ARCHERD 1922-2009

w/Marilyn, 1960

Variety columnist Army Archerd, who had a 56-year exclusive on what was happening on film sets the world over, died today at age 87, and let me tell ya, kids, I think this marks the official end of old Hollywood. Archerd may have been our last link to the studio age, and to celluloid idols that built this town. It's often said that there wasn’t a star in the pantheon, no matter how reclusive, who refused a call from Army, and that’s because he was movielover as well as a journalist, and as such, never printed a mean or catty word, a lesson many a contemporary blogger and movie critic could learn. They should exhibit Army Archerd’s Rolodex — surely worth its weight in gold — in the Smithsonian, right next to Archie Bunker's chair and Dorothy's ruby  slippers. (Chuck Wilson)

review: "All About Steve"

ALL ABOUT STEVE

In this refreshingly quirky comedy, Sandra Bullock is Mary Horowitz, a Sacramento crossword puzzle writer who’s geeky and hyperactive and generally too much to bear. When her parents fix her up with a handsome cable news cameraman named Steve (Bradley Cooper), Mary pounces, but quickly scares him away with talk of “destiny.” Undeterred, she begins following Steve and a washed-up reporter (Thomas Haden Church) as they head across America, covering ratings grabbers such as a baby with three legs, and a mine shaft cave-in that’s stranded a dozen hearing impaired children. Writer Kim Barker (License to Wed) and first-time director Phil Traill aren’t afraid of big jokes (deaf kids down a well) but they also pay attention to the small details of character. As if to suggest that Mary finds solace in a nerd-friendlier time, her bedroom décor is strictly 1969-70, while her much-discussed go-go boots are a seeming nod to the kooky brainiac Barbra Streisand portrayed in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970). Although Bullock initially struggles with a character she’s probably too old to play, she ultimately makes Mary funny and sympathetic without softening her innate weirdness. The actress earns points too for daring to co-produce a Hollywood comedy that isn’t about a wedding. (Chuck Wilson)