“Brief Interviews” is the directorial debut of Mr. The other subjects who have no such illusions are self-absorbed, deluded combatants adrift on the sexual battlefield. In the minds of the smug few who imagine they have the answers to Freud’s original question, what women want is to be controlled by men who assume they have mastered the mechanics of seduction and sexual technique. Beyond the characters’ desire to know what women want and how to use it to their advantage, there is no unifying motif connecting the fragments. But its composite portrait of the male psyche in the post-feminist era is repellent. “Brief Interviews” may be verbally dexterous and enthusiastically acted by the likes of Timothy Hutton, Christopher Meloni, Denis O’Hare, Ben Shenkman, Michael Cerveris and Bobby Cannavale. Compacted into an 80-minute mishmash of interviews, confessions and sketches, melded into a shaky mosaic, the answers from a cross section of men are shallow, self-serving and ultimately unenlightening. What do men want? This reversal of Freud’s famous question drives John Krasinski’s screen adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s 1999 short-story collection “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men” into a blind alley.
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