Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Written and directed by John Krasinski

Runtime: 80 minutes

Writer-director John Krasinski accomplishes the impossible with his adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men—he has made a movie cries out for a longer running time.

Stuffed with almost every “Hey, it’s that guy!” actor from the last five years, Krasinski has taken Wallace’s collection of fictional interviews about men behaving badly and framed them around a thesis project conducted by graduate student Sara (Julianne Nicholson, in a thankless role). But the conceit does little to make the story cinematic; there’s no overarching plot other than Sara struggling to come to terms with the end of her relationship with Ryan (Krasinski, giving himself a plum part that perfectly matches his gone-to-seed All American good looks) by talking to men about how they see women. And surprise—most of them don’t see women as people.

The acting during the interviews from stars including Bobby Cannavale, Ben Shenkman, Will Forte, and Christopher Meloni, is almost airlessly perfect. Technically accomplished, Krasinski’s rigid structure makes their performances feel more like stellar audition monologues than genuine emotional outbursts. Their stories have the polished sheen of cocktail party anecdotes rather than the feel of a confession, and that’s a major misstep in making these men seem like anything more than misogynists.

The sole time story and cinema connect comes late in the film, with a confrontation between student Daniel (Dominic Cooper) and Sara. Cutting back and forth in a mounting frenzy between increasingly threatening versions of the same conversation regarding Daniel’s politically incorrect thesis regarding rape, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men actually begins to feel like a movie. Gone are the non-existent stakes of Sara’s interviews, replaced with a genuine, emotional argument that veers from the political to the personal. But just as the story feels air-borne, the movie abruptly ends, leaving a niggling suspicion that what we’ve just seen isn’t a film so much as a collection of acting reels for its male performers. Julianne Nicholson—and audiences—deserve better.