Before James Frey’s exposed memoir fictions and before the controversy over the identity of author J.T. Leroy, there was Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin’s The Night Listener,
a fictionalization of real-life events which detailed the writer’s
long-distance friendship with a horrifically abused, young teenager,
himself an author, and how Maupin came to doubt the very existence of
said boy. The film adaptation, whispery and solemn, skulks into this
cynical void, dutifully playing out a string that even those outside of
arthouse audiences will see coming.

Celebrated writer and
syndicated late night radio show host Gabriel Noone (Robin Williams) is
an intellectual magpie of sorts, taking the most colorful moments from
his life and the lives of those around him and discarding the rest
while weaving lyrical and elegiac musings on modern life and its myriad
disconnections. As his own personal life comes crumbling down around
him — his AIDS-stricken boyfriend Jess (Bobby Cannavale) moves out,
accusing him of plundering their relationship for creative occupational
gain — Gabriel develops an intense connection over the phone with a
devoted young listener named Pete (Rory Culkin).

Terminally ill, Pete lives in Wisconsin and is taken care of by his
adopted mother, Donna Logand (Toni Collette), and he has a horrific
backstory of abuse — sexual, physical and emotional — that he has
poured into a shockingly well-written memoir of his adolescence. This
manuscript, combined with Pete’s tremendous intellect and sardonic
vulnerability, immediately resonate with Gabriel. The pair talks
weekly, then sometimes daily. When questions begin to arise regarding
Pete’s well-being and very identity, Gabriel indulges his investigatory
instinct and travels to Wisconsin in order to get to the bottom of the
situation.

As directed and co-adapted by The Business of Strangers’ Patrick Stettner, the film could play as the opening half of a double bill with Williams’ previous One Hour Photo,
so guided is it by a loose sense of free-floating menace and
melancholy. Indeed, if one wandered into The Night Listener knowing absolutely
nothing about it and possessing patience for its measured rhythms, they
could easily be unnerved by Collette’s increasingly spookily detached,
evocative interpretation of Donna — is she a Misery-type
obsessed fan, merely a damaged soul, or both? But the revelation of
Gabriel’s investigation by its very nature tips the movie’s hand as to
just what kind of film it is.

The Night Listener is nominally about identity, but unlike thematically similar fare like Adaptation, The Sixth Sense, Swimming Pool, Mulholland Drive or even Identity,
there’s neither a strongly rooted and compulsively sympathetic central
character, nor an engaging, swirling elusiveness to the movie that
keeps it dancing ahead of total cognition until after the final reel.
Gabriel in and of himself is a well sketched and fully
three-dimensional character, and decently embodied by Williams, but his
obsession here with Pete seems arbitrary (the result of heretofore
obscured paternal instincts?), leaving the actor to fall back on that
trademark look of intestinal discomfort that substitutes, variously,
for pained worry, pained compassion and pained disappointment. As it
moves forward, the film, too, becomes rife with implausibilities. Joe
Morton plays Gabriel’s agent in a few scenes and Sandra Oh wanders in
as a friend of his, and while they feed and agree with Gabriel’s
doubts, none of these ostensibly bright people seems to have any good
ideas about how to discern the truth in non-dangerous and non-creepy
ways.

Presented on DVD in a solid, 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that captures the movie’s somber palette, The Night Listener‘s supplemental features consist of eight preview trailers for other films, a single, 40-second, heartily disowned deleted scene introduced by Stettner, and a 12-minute spoiler-type featurette that focuses almost exclusively on the movie’s late-act plot twist. With interviews from Maupin and Williams, among others, this is a nice, if too brief, inclusion. An English langauge Dolby digital 5.1 track anchors the audio,
buoyed by only a few surround effects. English, French and Spanish subtitles
are also available. Without stronger connective tissue to the factitious disorder on display, The Night Listener is an exercise in moody obligations, though at only 82 minutes one that certain sympathetic arthouse audiences will likely find some measured enjoyment in. C+ (Movie) C (Disc)