BRIEF INTERVIEW WITH HIDEOUS MEN
The 29-year-old actor
John Krasinski reports that participating in a staged reading of Wallace's
story while a
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
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)