15, 81 mins
The main warning in The Night Listener is to beware of Robin Williams with a beard. It usually means that he’s going to be all maudlin and serious, like his Oscar-winning turn in Good Will Hunting. Here he’s the hirsute Gabriel, an author and radio monologist in New York who strikes up a telephone friendship with one of his listeners, Pete, a 14-year-old boy dying of Aids whose soon-to-be-published memoir details his hellishly abused childhood. But does Pete really exist? Could he be the invention of his approval-starved carer (Toni Collette)? Or does Gabriel, who admits to “looting” other people’s lives in his fiction, including that of his recently departed boyfriend, desperately need Pete to be real?
In trying to answer such questions, this lugubrious, awkwardly structured and truncated film, adapted from Armistead Maupin’s semi-autobiographical novel, descends into increasingly implausible scenes as Williams thrusts for the truth and Collette parries. He strikes a single note of stoic despair while she lacks the screen time to let us grasp her character. Too many questions are left unanswered and too many points unmade. In the end, an intriguing story is reduced into the dimensions of an anecdote.
IAN JOHNS