Stanley Kubrick remarked of his adaptation of Lolita, “If it had been written by a lesser author, it might have been a better film.” Through exquisite prose and writing style, revered authors like Nabokov evoke an emotional response that is essentially untranslatable to the screen. This, in addition to the prestige of the author, heightens the expectations placed on such an adaptation; the film has to be successful in its own right while capturing the essence of the original work. Thus in the wake of David Foster Wallace’s suicide, the task of adapting his work is particularly daunting. He’s not only one of the most venerated post-modernists in America, but one whose untimely death still haunts the literary world. John Krasinski’s recent adaptation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men attempts to recreate Wallace’s complex, experimental story but ultimately fails to deliver the brilliance of Wallace’s writing.

John Krasinski’s film dramatizes the series of interviews chronicled in Wallace’s short story. The ambitious adaptation follows Sara Quinn [Julianne Nicholson], an anthropology PhD candidate, as she conducts interviews with men for her dissertation on female sexuality. The movie juxtaposes her formal interviews with scenes from Sara’s personal and professional life, in which she effectively “interviews” male acquaintances on subjects relevant to her work. After her recent estrangement from her boyfriend, Sara uses the interviews as a means of exploring her abandonment.  

Wallace’s story, divided into four shorter pieces interspersed throughout the collection of the same title, documents the transcripts of men identified only by interview number, location, month, and year. The subjects converse with an amorphous interviewer, whose questions and remarks are omitted and replaced with “Q.” followed by a blank line. In some of the interviews, the reader has a sense of a distinct female interviewer. The multiplicity of the interview locations, however, as well as the varying relationships between the interviewer and subject, does not necessarily suggest a common interviewer throughout the piece.

The power in Wallace’s story lies in the relationship between the details provided and those intentionally omitted. The subjects have strong, distinct voices, which the reader utilizes to construct their characters. The reader also effectively assumes the role of interviewer by inferring the interviewer’s questions through the subject’s responses. This creates an intimacy between the reader and the text in which the subjects appear to speak directly to the reader.

At the end of the story we still do not know who the men and the interviewers are, nor the purpose of the interviews. Herein lies the main distinction between the film and short story—the relationship between the work and the audience. While all of the interviews in the film are verbatim, or abridged versions of the interviews in the story, less creative responsibility is placed on the viewer. We understand why Sara embarks on the interviews and what she accomplishes by the end of the film. While we know little about the lives of subjects, we know their appearance, age, and ethnicity. In the “interviews” with the men from Sara’s life, we understand precisely who the subjects are, as well as their relationship to Sara. Although the spare dialog Krasinski added to make these interviews function as scenes flows seamlessly into Wallace’s lines, the characters he constructs function only to facilitate the “interviews” that Sara holds with them. The viewer subsequently contextualizes these men in response to their attitude towards Sara, deflecting attention away from the power of the monologues themselves. These additions and adjustments diminish the unsettling aura of Wallace’s narrative fostered through the pervasive anonymity employed within the piece.