The Night Listener (15)

I am told by those who have read the Armistead Maupin novel of the same title, on which this film is based, that the book is very different and more complex than the film. The story itself is based on a real life experience that "Tales of the City" writer Maupin and his then partner Terry Anderson had back in 1992 and, as Maupin and Anderson, along with director Stettner, are responsible for the screenplay, one can only assume that any changes made were with the approval of the author himself.

The main character Gabriel (Williams) is very clearly a fictionalised version of Maupin himself - a middle aged story teller with his own late night radio programme on which he is telling this tale to his listeners. He is also gay and when the story proper begins he is in the throes of dealing with the painful break up of his relationship with his partner Jess (Bobby Cannavale). One day he receives a manuscript written by 14 year old Pete (Culkin), a devoted fan, which is a memoir of the shocking physical and sexual abuse he claims to have suffered as a child. Moved by his story, Gabriel calls him and is drawn into an intense, almost surrogate father relationship over the telephone with the boy and also his protective, adoptive mother Donna (Collette). Until that is Jess, as Anderson did in real life all those years ago, remarks on the similarity between the boy's voice and the mother's. Gabriel then begins to question whether Pete really exists, or is he a fiction in which he is believing because he needs to in order to fill the gap in his life. He sets off to find Donna and Pete and get at the truth.

Williams is good as Maupin's alter ego - gentle, charming and convincing as a gay man, without being camp, and his voiceover narration is discreet and never overdone. The relationship between him and Jess, a younger man who has been dependent on Gabriel and is now asserting his independence, rings true. The story is constantly intriguing, though as mystery thrillers go it is not very tightly wound. But even though there is very little in the way of shock action, it holds your attention largely down to a superb and sometimes very scary performance from Collette. There’s a tension in the fact that you realise she’s unpredictable and could do anything. There is also a disturbing sequence, where Gabriel is hunting for Pete in a children's hospital and you fear that any moment he will be caught and accused of being a paedophile. Culkin too does well in the difficult part of a boy, who may only exist in Gabriel's willing imagination. Based as it is on the fictionalisation of a real experience, the film raises interesting questions about the links between truth and fiction and the nature of both. The one quibble I have is with its abrupt and unsatisfying ending. It feels as though we need some sort of further encounter between Gabriel and Donna to round matters off. I wonder if this is because Maupin is sticking very closely to what really happened, despite the fact that he like Gabriel is fictionalising and embroidering his own life? And life of course doesn't go in for neat, resolved, filmic endings.

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