Dwight's nemesis has turned a new page.
John Krasinski, best known for playing overqualified underachiever Jim Halpert on "The Office," is now trying his hand at directing. And he has chosen, of all things, to adapt "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men," the dense short story collection by the late, great David Foster Wallace.
Despite this rather flabbergasting combination, the film works. It serves as a fitting tribute to the life and work of a great author and is a solid creative debut for Krasinski.
The most significant liberty taken by Krasinski in his adaptation is the addition of a central character. The film replaces the book's unseen, anonymous interviewer with graduate student Sara (Julianne Nicholson) to make the story more relatable. Krasinski doesn't try to make the story comfortable — it's still quite fragmented — and the movie is also not explicit about Sara. She's simply there to ask questions and respond to these guys, who are uniformly desperate to vent about their bizarre urges and untraditional desires.
Recognizable actors, including Christopher Meloni ("Law & Order: Special Victims Unit") and Dominic Cooper ("Mamma Mia!"), parade in as Sara's interview subjects. "Brief Interviews" isn't merely a picture of particularly perverse or friendless men. Instead, we're shown the everyman. The men aren't all physically unattractive (though some certainly are), but the way they visualize and objectify women turns them into despicable creatures.
Only one interview strays from the film's focus on gender interaction: a powerful sequence in which a man recounts the story of his father, a lifelong men's room attendant. This scene shows more than any other that there's more to be gleaned from the unfettered ranting of men than misogyny and sexual hang-ups.
Following his dramatic performance in June's "Away We Go," Krasinski continues to prove that he's capable of more than just indicative stares at a still camera. Playing the role of Sara's ex-boyfriend, Krasinski has a stunning monologue near the end of the film in which he passionately recounts what led him to have an affair. As a director, he makes expert use of an austere interview room to force his characters to open up.
But just as the film is finally getting somewhere, reaching some newfound thesis on what makes males the way they are, it's over — it's only 80 minutes long. Still, with this drawback aside, "Interviews" is a fascinating look into the world of the unspoken.
