AfterElton.com - Review of The Night Listener (page 2)

Review of The Night Listener (page 2)
by Robert Urban, August 3, 2006

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Toni Collette (Little Miss Sunshine, The Sixth Sense, Muriel's Wedding) as Pete's creepy guardian, Donna, turns in a bone-chilling, Oscar-caliber performance. Psychologically speaking, Donna is uncharted territory: inscrutable and darkly dangerous, and Collette infuses her with a glowering, menacing manner. This is one social worker and stepmother with plenty of deep psychological scars of her own.

The Night Listener also features Sandra Oh (Sideways, Grey's Anatomy) as Gabriel's trusty assistant Anna, and Bobby Cannavale (The Station Agent, Will & Grace) as Gabriel's freedom-seeking ex-lover, Jess. Both actors deliver credible, no-nonsense performances. Anna and Jess act as Greek chorus for the story; they suspect the truth about Pete and Donna from the start and try to warn Gabriel. But Gabriel is too emotionally intertwined with his young fan to fully believe them. He's torn between wanting to be deceived and finding the truth.

In trying to squeeze the complex, multilayered novel of The Night Listener into an 82-minute movie, the filmmakers unfortunately removed much of the original book's atmosphere. But pared down to its action essentials, the movie pretty much hits the ground running, and director Patrick Stettner succeeds in pulling in the audience's attention. One cannot help but be strangely drawn towards the mystery surrounding Donna and Pete's true identities.

As The Night Listener progresses, one wonders if it will turn out like a Play Misty for Me type of stalker film or a Sixth Sense or Angel Heart type of supernatural mystery. With its murky themes of identity, obsession and subterfuge, the film also seems to channel the works of Alfred Hitchcock. Classics like Rear Window, Suspicion and The Man Who Knew Too Much come to mind.

Oddly, unlike the above, The Night Listener's ending offers no shocker. The film's outcome is predicted early on by several of its characters, and when the end finally does come, the film seems to let go in an inconclusive, somewhat unsatisfying way. It could use a better stunner of an ending.

While it may not totally succeed as an action thriller, The Night Listener nonetheless contains engaging portrayals and plenty of eeriness. Its topical social issues will also be of interest, especially to gay audiences.

Gays and lesbians are often unfairly made into scapegoats for our society's problems with child sexual abuse, and The Night Listener addresses this issue in on several levels. The film points out when such abuse is clearly heterosexual in nature, and it creates a plot twist in which a normal, innocent gay man may be mistaken for a straight child sex offender. The film also probes into the psychological problems of adult women who are sexually abused as children, even hinting at comparisons to Jeffrey Dahmer.

In addition, The Night Listener addresses timely and important issues that will especially resonate with the huge demographic of gay baby-boomer men who are now approaching their senior years. These issues include reconciling the often difficult relationship between an adult gay son and an aging father; the wishes and needs of gay men for fatherhood; problems arising from age differences in adult gay love relationships; and the dynamic between two ex-lovers.

Gay cinema, gay characters in film, and openly gay actors in the film industry have come a long way in recent years. It wasn't long ago that gays in film were mostly portrayed as faulty, superficial and one-dimensional. Gay filmmakers in Hollywood were virtually all closeted.

Now everyone-and especially gay film fans-can enjoy a movie like The Night Listener. Its characters' gay identities come off as a given and as a nonissue, reflecting a new social reality for gays in arts and entertainment. We are, more and more, a group that fully interacts with the larger, mainstream straight world in a multidimensional, matter-of-fact way. And that's something to appreciate.

Read our interview with Armistead Maupin,
Toni Collette and Patrick Stettner here

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