Brief Interviews

Saw two movies recently - an universally acclaimed one (The Squid and the Whale), and something that had been sold to me as a questionable first-time effort, with the emphasis on "effort" (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men).

The first one left me mostly cold and a wee bit annoyed. It felt like the lovechild of Wes Anderson and Todd Solondz, filled with frighteningly real and unlikable characters. I appreciated the whole hall of mirrors effect, with various people unwittingly echoing each other's sentiments and mannerisms, but there was nothing there that I could latch onto. I don't come from a broken home, I don't have siblings, and my sympathy compass is totally messed up. It's actually one of the reasons why I was never able to fully immerse myself in Mad Men - I usually empathised with the women, which was a very ungrateful exercise for the most part, and was primarily annoyed by Don Draper. The same thing happened with The Squid and the Whale - the father and the sons irritated me, so I was left with the mother, who didn't really provide an emotional anchor either, seeing as she was equally... three-dimensional.

Cue Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, which I really liked almost from start to finish. I remember reading on Pajiba that the book it was based on is basically unfilmable, and that despite their general good will towards John Krasinski (who wrote the script and directed) they felt it fell short. Well, I haven't read the book, and so find myself paraphrasing Kathleen Madigan yet again: "You don't see a frown on my face, do you? Should have waited for the movie instead, like a good American."

Now... it definitely feels like a book adaptation. A theatre play adaptation, even. The dialogue is actually more of a series of monologues, and all of them are very dense and verbose. Still, the only time I felt the pomposity explode the cinematic framework was when they saw it necessary to amp up an already larger-than-life tirade with some of that trademark indie movie discordant electric guitar and drums... jazz... thing.

As for specifics... the title basically says it all. It's a string of guys talking about their expectations, desires and thought patterns with brutal candidness, held together by a rather rudimentary plot. It works though. The monologues are very compelling (the book must be awesome), and there's quite a lot of talent involved. And by talent I mean fun faces - Bobby Cannavale, Lester from The Wire, Josh Charles (aka the dude who had Lara Flynn Boyle after him and still went for Stephen Baldwin. STEPHEN Baldwin, for crying outloud), Ben Shenkman playing a straight Louis Ironson, and a bunch of Hey, It's That Guy's. And John Krasinski himself, who got to perform the most harrowing of the monologues, and - in my opinion - sold it.

So yeah, if you don't mind your movies not trying to hide they're purely intelectual exercises - I highly recommend it.