When Moore is Less

At war with "Capitalism" and John Krasinski's "Hideous Men."

“Brief Interviews With Hideous Men” is nothing but questions. Adapted by “The Office” star John Krasinski from the short story collection by David Foster Wallace, the movie mixes and matches monologues from a wide range of unlucky subjects, who have been convinced to spill their guts in a university lab that resembles a police interrogation room. There, they confess neuroses both comic and disturbing: One involuntarily yells leftist slogans during sex; another confesses his erotic fascination with the protagonist of “Bewitched.” Bobby Cannavale appears as a man who has learned to use his severed limb as a tool of seduction; Josh Charles plays a serial womanizer giving the same “let’s-take-this-slow” speech to a dozen different women.

Their interlocutor, mostly unseen behind the camera, is Sara (Julianne Nicholson), a graduate student apparently researching the dark recesses of the male psyche. (Her study has a more explicit aim, but it’s pointedly unexplained until the movie’s last scene.) Fragments of her life, conversations with friends, her boss (Timothy Hutton), and flashes of her relationship with a bright-eyed cipher named Ryan (Krasinski) weave in and out, turning her into one of her own subjects.

Krasinski’s directing debut does not lack for ambition, but the movie feels like an acting exercise, a series of audition tapes edited into a feature film. Wallace’s prose, never intended as naturalistic dialogue, is made more stilted by some of the actors’ theatrical line readings, notably Christopher Meloni’s attempt to add a non-borough-specific New York accent to a speech already overburdened with stylistic flourishes.

A few of the longer segments stand out as accomplished set-pieces: Frankie Faison’s melancholy remembrance of his father’s stint as a bathroom attendant is laced with guilt and shame, but you have a sense that his character has told this story before, and that the emotions it evokes are as distant as the time it covers. At barely an hour and a quarter, Krasinski’s adaptation can’t hope to accumulate the crushing emotional weight of Wallace’s book, or equal his dazzling linguistic pyrotechnics. The movie is never a chore to watch, but its characters feel like microbes under glass: tiny, remote and insignificant.

Sam Adams is our guest critic for the month of September.

“Capitalism: A Love Story” is now open in New York and L.A.; “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men” opens in New York on September 25th.

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