Back to Sundance for one final review

Most of you probably know John Krasinski as the loveable Jim Halpert on the American version of The Office. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is Krasinski’s screenwriting and directorial debut, in which he adapts David Foster Wallace’s 1999 collection of short stories into a sometimes funny, sometimes intense story of one woman’s attempts to understand the underlying motives of men’s behavior. Sara is a doctoral candidate in anthropology who, after her boyfriend Ryan (Krasinski) leaves her for another woman, focuses her anthropological dissertation on discovering what makes men act the way they do. She does this by conducting a series of one-on-one interviews, in which her subjects reveal a more complicated set of motives for their behavior than she had expected. The story is told mostly through nonlinear flashbacks, which tend to convolute the message, but was overall very interesting and well acted. That is, until the last scene, in which Sara demands that Ryan elaborate on his reasons for leaving her. Krasinski’s diatribe sounds as if he is reading directly from one of Wallace’s stories, word for word. It’s an entirely unrealistic conversation that sounds like a bad stump speech. I would have had an overall positive impression of this film, but this last scene really ruined the whole thing. Honestly, Krasinski’s performance was so bad, I don’t think I’ll even watch The Office in the same way from now on.