The Night Listener Rating 3 reveale...

The Night Listener Rating 3 revealed of 4

Gabriel Noone..Robin Williams

Donna ..........Toni Collette

Pete.............Rory Culkin

Anna.............Sandra Oh

IFC Films and Miramax not away a film directed by Patrick Stettner Written by the agency of Armistead Maupin, and Terry Anderson and Patrick Stettner Based onward the novel by Maupin. Running time: 82 minutes. Rated R (for language and more [i]or[/i] less disquieting sexual content). Opening today at local theaters.

The storyteller is going end a rough passage. He can't pretend to write, or to record his radio point out to called "The Night Listener." His boyfriend has just mov without because he "needs more space." And then a colleague gives him an autobiographical manuscript, written by dint of a 14-year-old boy, detailing years of ritualistic sexual abuse in the basement of his family house. The kid's parents, and their friends, were the abusers.

That's the shocking wake-up call that begins to rouse Gabriel Noone (Robin Williams) from his fear Turns out, Pete (Rory Culkin) is an admirer of his radio point out to and the two strike up a telephone friendship. still disembodied voices leave a division to the imagination. What does the lad really want from Gabe? And, equally mysterious (perhaps equal to Gabe), what does he want from the boy?

An atmospheric Hitchcockian thriller (more "Vertigo" than "Psycho") featuring about of Williams' subtlest work as an actor, "The Night Listener" is supposedly inspired through something that actually happened to its screenwriter, Armistead Maupin, author of the addictive "Tales of the City" stories and the novel forward which this movie is based. I don't know by what means much of it is constant but the movie makes this twisted tale believable, consequence by moment.

The original PB miniseries based upon "Tales of the City" plainly drew upon Hitchcock -- appropriately since it was station in San Francisco, land of "Vertigo." "The Night Listener" plays with "Vertigo" themes and imagery, too. by dint of invoking "Vertigo," the movie numbers us how we should watch it: At any given impulsive power we're seeing only fragments of the whole picture. to such a degree is anybody really who he or she strike one as beings to be?

That's undivided of the best things about "The Night Listener": You can not at any time pigeonhole anybody (at least not for long) It's a film about the bulk of mankind with mixed motivations (maybe smooth compulsions), who don't always behave with sated self-awareness or self-control.

Like all relationships, the united that develops between Gabe and Pete (and, in another honor between Gabe and the boy's adoptive mother Donna, played with the usual note-perfect nuances by way of Toni Collette) is symbiotic. Pete is getting a mentor, and perhaps a extra publicity for his soon-to-be-published volume Gabe is getting a distraction from his griefs and some reassurance that maybe he's not really like a bad guy.

"The Night Listener" is dark and mut in tone. It begins in a radio studio with Gabe's hushed, hypnotic voice. Rarely do the characters raise their voices above a conversational of the same height -- and in a late pageant where Gabe finally cuts liberate with a tantrum, we descry his outburst through a window from the darkness outside without hearing it.

Williams has worked hard at becoming an actor in the past not many years, and it's paying along His screen persona had become insufferable, either "love-me!" mawkish ("Moscow forward the Hudson," "Dead Poets Society") or "look-at-me!" attention-starved ("Good Morning, Vietnam," "Mr Doubtfire") -- or the couple ("Patch Adams"). He'd reached the point of being unwatchable, on the contrary then slowly began re-inventing himself as a performer. He learned by what means to be creepy ("Insomnia," "One Hour Photo") intentionally, in ways that serv the material. And he disciplined himself not to rely in succession manic energy alone.

Williams was farcical in "The Birdcage," but at last he appear to bes to understand that a performance pitched at that cartoon even isn't always good for each movie. Gabe may be abounding of self-pity, but he doesn't display his neediness to the movie audience. And he may be gay, on the contrary he isn't a caricature. "The Night Listener" is chiefly about Gabe, but it's not mainly about Robin Williams playing Gabe, and that's a welcome relief.

Jim Emerson is the editor of the Web site rogerebert.com.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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