The Night Listener - Austin American-Statesman movie review

Williams subtly shines in 'The Night Listener'

By JOHN DeFORE
Austin American-Statesman

Director Patrick Stettner's 2001 feature-length debut, "The Business of Strangers," was an engrossing, dialogue-heavy drama about a pair of people — one successful and one seemingly floundering — forming a quick, unlikely friendship and ultimately playing mind games with each other.

Miramax Films

'The Night Listener'

3 out of 5 stars

The verdict: The often-manic star gives one of his best performances in this atmospheric but uneven psychological drama.

Director: Patrick Stettner
Starring: Robin Williams, Toni Collette, Rory Culkin, Joe Morton, Sandra Oh
Run time: 91 minutes
Release date: August 4, 2006
Rating: R for language and some disquieting sexual content.
See showtimes

Turn your radio on
A look at five other movie radio personalities who get up close and personal with the audience.

On the web
Official movie site
View the trailer
Trailers require Quicktime

So it's easy to see what attracted the filmmaker to this project: Armistead Maupin's novel offers a popular radio storyteller named Gabriel Noone (Robin Williams) who gets to know a fan named Pete Logand, a teenager who endured a hellish childhood and has written a book about it, through long-distance telephone calls and, after becoming emotionally attached to him, is led to believe that he might not be a real person.

Moving from the claustrophobic setting of "Strangers" (where the two women are stuck on a business trip in a middle-of-nowhere hotel) to that of "The Night Listener," though, makes it difficult for Stettner to re-create the subtle psychological shifts that worked so well the first time. Here we have the passage of time and changes of location to relieve tension; more importantly, minor characters keep popping up to tell us things the protagonist should be thinking of himself. The first film resembled a really good play; this one has all the trappings of a conventional movie, and we start inevitably expecting it to behave like one.

That means that on some level we're disappointed when — as Noone begins to entertain doubts about his friend, and then to act on them — things don't swing full-tilt into psychological-thriller territory. The plot invites all sorts of suspense clichés, and Stettner rejects most of them, but he's not exactly sure what to give us in their place. The result is underwhelming, leading viewers to suspect the tale (a piece of fiction inspired, we're told, by a real episode) would been much more involving as a long nonfiction magazine piece.

Robin Williams, for one, benefits from the story's leap off the page. Of all the attempts he's made over the years to step away from his stardom into quieter or more edgy roles, this is one of the best. Noone is damaged goods, suffering writer's block after the breakup of a long-term relationship (one he has chronicled in his radio show, as he helped his boyfriend live with AIDS), and is already plenty vulnerable when things start to go bad. But Williams is surprisingly subtle here, never turning mawkish or manic. Given some of his past performances, it seems safe to give the director some credit; whether this film was the best sophomore move for Stettner or not, Robin Williams should be happy he made it.