by Frank Calvillo
Box Office Alternative Column
Box Office Alternative is a weekly look into additional/optional choices to the big-budget spectacle opening up at your local movie theater every Friday. Oftentimes, titles will consist of little-known or underappreciated work from the same actor/writer/director/producer of said new release, while at other times, the selection for the week just happens to touch upon the same subject in a unique way. Above all, this is a place to revisit and/or discover forgotten cinematic gems of all kinds.
As a lover of both holiday films and horror movies, I am excited as all get out for Krampus! The film sees an average family headed by Toni Collette and Adam Scott repeatedly tortured by the folkloric creature in what looks like a fun Christmas horror tale.
While the film seems like the kind of fun that’s right up my alley, it does prove an odd choice for Collette, who I can more or less venture to guess will be better than the material deserves. Therefore, I thought I’d revisit what I consider to be Collette’s best work opposite Robin Williams in the thriller The Night Listener.
Based on the novel by Armistead Maupin (who also co-wrote the screenplay), The Night Listener tells the story of popular New York radio host Gabriel Noone (Robin Williams), who is reeling from the end of a long-term relationship with his lover Jess (Bobby Cannavale). When a publisher friend of his (Joe Morton) shows him an advance copy of a book written by a 14-year-old boy named Pete Logand (Rory Culkin) chronicling the devastating abuse suffered at the hands of his horrendous parents, Gabriel finds himself taken with the boy’s story and spirit. With the approval of Donna (Collette), Pete’s adoptive mother, Gabriel eventually makes phone contact with Pete and the two soon develop a father/son bond, hampered only by the fact that the teenager is dying from full-blown AIDS. After a while, those around Gabriel begin to suggest that Donna and Pete are one and the same person, a notion which Gabriel instantly shuts down. However, an out of service phone number, a lack of medical records, and the absence of a single person who claims to have actually seen the boy, leads Gabriel to investigate the actual truth about Pete for himself.
The genesis for The Night Listener came from a true experience Maupin had with a teenaged fan who contacted him with a book he had written, which detailed the many kinds of abuse he suffered at the hands of his biological parents. When it was revealed that the woman claiming to be the boy’s adoptive mother, was also pretending to be the boy himself, the experience resulted in pieces from The New York Times and 20/20, while Maupin turned the incident into a bestselling novel.
Genre-wise, The Night Listener is a thriller, plain and simple. Yet while there are no jump moments to be had here, what is left is the chilling questioning of reality, and specifically, which one is actually real. There’s the one inside Gabriel’s head which includes a strong friendship between him and Pete, and the real-world one which contains the frightening and unthinkable prospect that Pete might not even exist. Director Patrick Stettner brings the proceedings to life with an atmosphere and mood shrouded in a curious air, pulling the audience into Gabriel’s mystery, giving certain scenes an eeriness even when nothing overtly eerie is happening.
What keeps those watching The Night Listener hooked until its conclusion is the ongoing questioning throughout of which reality is real. The film does this through two separate and distinct halves. The first features Gabriel’s imagined sequences comprised of what his idea of Pete and Donna are like according to the portraits he has painted as a result of numerous phone conversations. The second shows Gabriel ferociously fighting his suspicions and doubts as he travels to Wisconsin in an attempt to prove to everyone in his life (himself most of all) that Pete exists when all he’s faced with is a blind Donna continuously clouding what is more real than not.
In Pete, Gabriel sees a bright light in his dark existence. It isn’t long before a deep longing bordering on obsession develops on the latter’s part. Gabriel literally needs Pete to exist after the teenager has proven to be the broken man’s sole lifeline. When Gabriel begins his search, he’s not only fighting for Pete’s existence but for his own reason to exist as well.
Williams gives what could be his last great performance with The Night Listener. In his hands, the actor makes Gabriel a semi-tragic figure who has been wounded by the past and is desperate to hold onto the human connection he has found. Williams plays his role with a quiet manic quality as he takes in the effects of the harsh revelations he encounters. Meanwhile, Collette makes for a stellar scene partner in what is unquestionably the film’s trickiest role. Her Donna must exist in two realities, the brief one inside Gabriel’s head and the emotionally fragile one he encounters in real life. The actress is brilliant in her ongoing struggle to convince Gabriel of Pete’s existence and her own connection to him.
Cannavale does a stellar job as Jess and his scenes with Williams are a mixture of beauty and sorrow, while Culkin perfectly brings the playfulness and warmth of Pete to life in such a powerful way that it becomes instantly understandable why Gabriel bonded with him in the first place.
The Night Listener received mixed-to-decent reviews upon its debut at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, enough to indicate it could have become one of those indies which could have garnered some awards acclaim as well as a bit of indie box office success. However an ill-conceived release date in the summer of 2006 squashed any such plans as the modest thriller was largely ignored after being forced to compete alongside more blockbuster fare.
The Night Listener was never designed to be one of those thrillers that shocks, but rather one which haunts. And on that level, the film was more than successful. It’s been nearly a decade since I sat in the theater watching the film and I can still recall its final scene which has left me decidedly unnerved to this day. There’s something so stark and truthful about the twisted darkness of human nature that proves so hard to capture on film. Yet The Night Listener is one of those rarest of films to capture such a tricky part of humanity in such a poetic and compelling way.
