Sundance 2009: Hideous Men and Big Fans

Robert D. Siegel wrote the critically acclaimed film The Wrestler (which just scored an Oscar nomination for Mickey Rourke's performance), and before that he was a senior editor for The Onion. And now he's making his directorial debut at Sundance with Big Fan. Patton Oswalt plays the title character, Paul, a Staten Island parking lot attendant who spends his nights and weekends obsessing over the New York Giants and their star linebacker. He lives with his mother, writes rant-filled commentary to read on late-night call-in radio shows, and sets up a lawn chair, a cooler, and a TV outside of home games that he can't afford to watch from inside the stadium. With their biggest fan in the parking lot, the Giants couldn't possibly lose.

Making a serious film with a slightly humorous edge, Siegel captures Paul's working class surroundings very well, and Oswalt embodies the guy's low-key but indelible enthusiasm. And even though he lacks the level of control that Darren Aronofsky brought to The Wrestler, it offers one of the most rousing, oddly inspired conclusions of any film I saw at the festival. The drama kicks in when Paul's naive admiration for the linebacker moves uncomfortably into the realm of stalking, and the complications that arise recall Scorsese's underappreciated film from 1982, The King of Comedy. With a strong director like Scorsese, or for that matter Aronofsky, this might have been a taut, ironic thriller. As it is, Siegel doesn't have a good grasp of structure or pacing, he lets things drag in the middle when the character has no clear motivation, and he edits conversations like he's nervously following a ping-pong ball around the room. But the tense, disorienting finale and the complex themes woven into the tale show that Siegel has great potential as a storyteller.

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David Foster Wallace wrote fiction that does not convert easily into screenplays. It's not a simple matter of deleting scenes and writing a little dialogue; it's a matter of concocting a new piece of art, a film, that manages to echo some of the essence of a work that exists solely, immutably on the page. His Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a collection of thematically related short pieces, many of which include extensive first person passages of men offering their hideous thoughts about women. Not only was Wallace a heavy stylist, but he also, in book after book, reveled in a kind of structural chaos. His novels feel like boxes of found documents that are missing pages, that are stacked out of order, and that hide their secrets beneath coffee stains or between the lines of irrelevant details. They begin mid-thought and set a scene only by context, through the tenses or gestures embedded in the dialogue. In Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, he gave us one side of every conversation; the opposing voice is muted entirely by the non-stop blathering of men.

John Krasinski — the actor who plays Jim Halpert in The Office — has taken the task of adapting the book for the screen, and he's directed the film himself. He also stars as one of the men, or two if you consider the very thought of writing and directing this project to be hideous. The result is gracefully shot and impressively smooth for someone making his first film, but Krasinski has grouped Wallace's pile of documents under an overarching umbrella, stitching them neatly together so that instead of fragments we get a mosaic. It's a subtle change, but the feeling is very different. In the film, we know who's on the other side of most of these conversations. She's Sara Quinn, a graduate student played by Julianne Nicholson. We see the men in her life, the professor she's working with, the students she teaches, and the people she bumps into at parties. And we hear her one-sentence description of the project, which sounds like something lifted from Cliff's Notes. Krasinski uses much of Wallace's text verbatim, but the additional context provided by Sara's very presence alters every interview. A man telling the long, troubling, and perhaps inadvertently revealing story about meeting a hippy girl at a concert — and learning about her rape — has a very different effect when that man is not just a disconnected voice in a pile of interview transcripts but the boyfriend of the woman at the center of the film.

In some ways, Krasinski has captured the plot of the book, thin as it is, but not the spirit. The adaptation is clever and yet meaningless. It's showy but in the wrong ways. It's also, occasionally, riveting. Frankie Faison (who played Burrell in The Wire) is a man who talks about his father's demeaning occupation, and his interview is the highlight of the film, even though Krasinski has removed Wallace's most disgusting details. It's also the monologue with the least attachment to the Sara character, an aberration from the string of men on the make. It's an aberration in Wallace's text, too — begging the question of why the son should be called "hideous" — but in the film, because its themes are not bouncing off of a quiet opposite, are not woven into a tapestry like everything else, it almost stands alone as a short film. For the rest of the movie, Krasinski has competently stiched together pieces that probably work better in a jumbled heap.

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During the first few minutes of Bronson, I didn't want to like it. Its title character is as hideous as any man in David Foster Wallace's text. But that's the funny thing about an exceptionally well made film: it makes its case even as its still running. Michael Peterson was an extremely unruly individual. Since his days in elementary school he took to throwing viscous punches at whomever got within arm's reach. As an adult, a bald, mustachioed, incorrigible brute, he became known as the most dangerous prisoner in Britain's corrections system, a man who'd take a bloody mile and three teeth if you gave him an inch of freedom, a man who adopts as his fight name "Charles Bronson."

I'm not sure such a man is worthy of this gorgeous treatment. The film is lit beautifully and moves through sets that are dingy and theatrical like the booths of a carnival side show. Bronson himself looks like someone who'd be in one of Ricky Jay's journals of anomalies, except that his only claim to fame is throwing mean punches willy nilly. He's shut up like an animal, but as he'll tell you himself he's never killed a soul. He's taken hostages. He's made some nasty threats. But the final scenes of a man locked away in a cage barely bigger than he is raise questions about matching punishment to the crime. With shit-smeared prison walls, Bronson sometimes resembles the recent, highly regarded film by Steve McQueen, Hunger, whose prison-bound horror had the underpinnings of social justice. McQueen's prisoners were Irish Republicans who demanded to be treated as political prisoners when they were captured in an act of aggression. Is there any way to turn a punching machine like Bronson into a constructive member of society; is he rebelling against anything but basic order?

Part of what makes the film so fascinating is director Nicolas Winding Refn's excellent sense of order. He knows when to loll about, when to coil the film quietly like a spring, and Tom Hardy playing the bare-knuckle Bronson gives an awe-inspiring, apoplectic performance as rage personified, pacing as if he can barely wait for Refn's cue to bare his teeth and kick forth. I haven't begun to decide whether I like this film, but I'm absolutely sure that I won't soon forget it.

Here's the Bronson trailer:

See more of our Sundance coverage here.