I Watched This: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

David Foster Wallace's collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men uses our (guys') women-hounding to describe the modern difficulty when it comes to true human relationships. Sort of makes sense, right? If you're all about the poon, you can't see the heart. That connection isn't enough, though, because that's a bit transparent and a bit too simple; just that and there isn't really any way to say anything new. So DFW layers with a pretty cool technique: Q & A's where the Q's are blanked out. The reader becomes the interviewer, filling in the questions with information from the answers. The women-hounder, speaking directly to us, becomes universal since he doesn't do the literary thing and describe his clothes or his face or particular details of setting. Basically, this whole project works because of  David Foster Wallace's genuine preoccupation with this issue of empathy and his skilled deployment of a couple of literary techniques.Transferring this thing on to film would be an uphill battle for anyone. To me, John Krasinski, Jim from The Office, doesn't seem the guy to do this thing proper.

Gone is the blank-Q and A. Instead, we get a series of actors delivering monologues backed with a jazz soundtrack, in a gray interview room, in restaurants, and in apartment hallways. Reminded me a bit of Altman's adaptation of Carver's Short Cuts. There's a bunch of capable guys doing their things. Lester Freeman from The Wire delivering wisdom on how to satisfy women not with gels and tantra, but through letting the girl go down on you. Will Arnett pleading, half-assed and picking his nails, through a locked apartment door. Best is Chris Meloni. Remember his predatory yet romantic Chris Keller from Oz? He somewhat ressurrects the character here. He tells a work colleague about a heartbroken girl at an arrivals terminal. He also mentions her tits. Meloni delivers the fillm's only moment of emotion when he concludes his story teary-eyed. Of course, he sums up implying that he ended up doing said girl. Too bad this guy is spending his prime wasting away on Law and Order.

Without the blank Q and A device, all the complexity disappears. The mysogyny and human disconnect isn't universalized anymore, but just a series of particular and not very nuanced characters. One of my favorite lines in the book is "The reason I married my wife is because she still had a good body even after having a kid." When I read that, I knew the truth of that in my gut but also pictured a bunch of different dudes uttering that line. It might just be me, but I was a bit irritated seeing it made particular in the form of Timothy Hutton as a university prof behind his paper-cluttered desk. Here, there's an extra filter, a loss of immediacy.

Probably even worse is John Krasinki's own monologue. He gives himself the book's climax where an interviewee tells of a conquest of a hippie who, after sex, tells him about her own rape that occurred years before. The rub is that she'd survived by forcing an emotional connect with her rapist. The way that DFW makes this work is by a series of reports where the woman feels for her attacker, the interviewee feels for her and the attacker, and the reader feels for the woman, the attacker, and the interviewee. It’s a pretty complex set of reports that brings to life a lattice of empathy. One misstep and the reader/viewer will walk away (I mean this is a girl feeling for her rapist). I’m not sure if there’s a bigger misstep than having John Krasinski deliver an uninterrupted rape-centered monologue directly to the audience.

The easy thing to do to conclude this thing is how Krasinski forces himself on the viewer, but I'm not going to go that far. I'm not going to say this is a hideous movie either. If anything, this is a pretty earnest attempt to adapt from a earnest fan.  I guess, the punniest yet least hyperbolic is to wish that it was a bit briefer.