AfterElton.com - Review of The Night Listener

Review of The Night Listener
by Robert Urban, August 3, 2006

Directed by Patrick Stettner (The Business of Strangers) and based on the novel by Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City), The Night Listener revolves around a popular, gay, late-night radio personality who becomes dangerously entangled with an intriguing, 14-year-old fan and the fan's adopted mother.

Maupin sums up his disturbing tale in the film's press release: "The Night Listener is about the question of how do we love, what do we become obsessed with, what do we long for-and most of all, how are we blinded by those things? I think they're the most fascinating mysteries."

Gabriel Noone (Robin Williams) is a gay man suffering through personal mid-life issues. He is depressed over his recent breakup with his long-time lover (played by Bobby Cannavale), and he struggles with his problematic relationship with his gruff, aging father, who as a straight man has difficulties with having a gay son.

Gabriel begins talking on the phone to a boy named Pete (Rory Culkin) and a woman named Donna (Toni Collette). Pete claims to have suffered through an abusive childhood, and Donna claims to be the orphaned Pete's caretaker. Pete has supposedly authored a manuscript about his ordeal that Donna hopes Gabriel will help them get published.

The lonely and emotionally distraught Gabriel discovers a kind of solace in his two mysterious telephone confidants, who provide a secret, disembodied source of psychotherapy for him. But the film takes a disturbing turn when Gabriel begins to suspect the boy might not really exist.

The Night Listener then kicks into high gear as Gabriel leaves his ordered, urbane existence and sets out on a harrowing journey to Pete and Donna's small hometown in rural Wisconsin. Gabriel is determined to find out the truth about this boy, whom he has only spoken to on the phone. The trip turns out to be a troubling, bizarre and macabre venture.

Maupin's novel of the same name, published in 2000, created a sensation when its real life origins were revealed by an investigative article in The New Yorker. The novel was inspired by Maupin's extended, long-distance telephone friendship with a person who appeared to be a precocious, wise, 14-year-old boy and his protective, adopted mother. Maupin and others were tricked into believing that an autobiographical manuscript they received was actually authored by a sexually abused boy dying of AIDS.

"I realized that I had stumbled on the most fascinating story of my life-that I was actually living a novel," Maupin explains in the film's press materials. "I was in the middle of a mystery which delivered to me something that I'd always wanted to write."

In tackling the perplexing lead role of Gabriel, Robin Williams (The Birdcage) gives a subdued, serious, and somewhat guarded performance. His heartfelt portrayal of a gay man suffering through a host of mid-life crises is respectably convincing.

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