 is<br />
an intellectual magpie of sorts, taking the most colorful moments from<br />
his life and the lives of those around him and discarding the rest<br />
while weaving lyrical and elegiac musings on modern life and its myriad<br />
disconnections. As his own personal life comes crumbling down around<br />
him — his AIDS-stricken boyfriend Jess (Bobby Cannavale) moves out,<br />
accusing him of plundering their relationship for creative occupational<br />
gain — <b>Gabriel develops an intense connection over the phone with a<br />
devoted young listener named Pete</b> (Rory Culkin). </p>
<p>Terminally ill, Pete lives in Wisconsin and is taken care of by his<br />
adopted mother, Donna Logand (Toni Collette), and he has a horrific<br />
backstory of abuse — sexual, physical and emotional — that he has<br />
poured into a shockingly well-written memoir of his adolescence. This<br />
manuscript, combined with Pete’s tremendous intellect and sardonic<br />
vulnerability, immediately resonate with Gabriel. The pair talks<br />
weekly, then sometimes daily. <b>When questions begin to arise regarding<br />
Pete’s well-being and very identity, Gabriel indulges his investigatory<br />
instinct</b> and travels to Wisconsin in order to get to the bottom of the<br />
situation. </p>
<p>As directed and co-adapted by <i>The Business of Strangers</i>’ Patrick Stettner, <b><i>The Night Listener</i><i>One Hour Photo</i>,<br />
so guided is it by a loose sense of free-floating menace and<br />
melancholy</b> could play as the opening half of a double bill with Williams’ previous . Indeed, if one wandered into the movie knowing absolutely<br />
nothing about it and possessing patience for its measured rhythms, they<br />
could easily be unnerved by <b>Collette’s increasingly spookily detached,<br />
evocative interpretation of Donna — is she a <i>Misery</i>-type<br />
obsessed fan, merely a damaged soul, or both?</b> But the revelation of<br />
Gabriel’s investigation by its very nature tips the movie’s hand as to<br />
just what kind of film it is. </p>
<p><i>The Night Listener</i> is <b>nominally about identity</b>, but unlike thematically similar fare like <i>Adaptation</i>, <i>The Sixth Sense</i>, <a href=)
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. Without stronger connective tissue to the factitious disorder on display, The Night Listener is an exercise in moody obligations. (Miramax, R, 82 mins.)