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Trailer for "The Night Listener"

It’s only a coincidence that this film arrives in theaters so soon after it was revealed that writer J. T. LeRoy, supposedly an abused boy who turned his horrifying life into fiction for therapy, was actually a middle-aged woman. In fact, awareness of that event works against this movie, leading your thinking as to where the plot is heading. Inspired by an incident that happened to writer Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City), The Night Listener stars Robin Williams as Gabriel, a writer and radio personality who is approached to do a book blurb. The subject is a memoir by a teen-aged boy, Pete, who spend years being sexually abused by his parents and is now dying of AIDS. Gabriel is going through the death throes of a long-term relationship with his own lover and initially responds strongly to Pete: They become friends in long phone conversations. But something seems not quite right, and Gabriel grows obsessed with the idea that the voice he hears on the phone may actually be that of Donna (Toni Collette), his guardian. Director Patrick Stettner (The Business of Strangers) maneuvers the plot well enough so that it consistently twists away just when you think you see where it’s going to. Williams gives one of the dour performances he trots out when he wants to be taken seriously, but it’s appropriate to the material; ditto Collette’s off-center turn. But the movie is all development and no payoff, as if they forgot to film the third act. Just when you think it’s heading toward a climax, it’s over: The credits roll at barely 75 minutes. Earlier versions were reported to run 20 minutes longer, and this film was released by the infamously edit-happy Miramax, but the problem seems to lie more in the script. If Maupin’s excuse is that this is how the real story ended, then maybe he needed to do a bit more fictionalizing.