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By: GREG MARZULLO
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One of the most popular gay authors of modern times, Armistead Maupin, is coming to the movies. His quirky, unsettling and best-selling 2000 novel “The Night Listener,” has been made into a film and will arrive in theaters on Aug. 4 courtesy of Miramax films.
Directed by Patrick Stettner, who partially wrote the screenplay along with Maupin and the author’s former partner Terry Anderson, the movie stars Robin Williams and Toni Collette in a Hitchcock-like rendition of the novel.
“I’ve always wanted to do a genre film,” says Stettner, who is straight. “[‘The Night Listener’] felt very organic and very suspenseful.”
From the film’s opening frames which is like looking through a kaleidoscope of faces and bodies melting into beautiful monstrosities, viewers will realize that the distortion of widely held truths can take on dangerously new interpretations. In the film and book of “The Night Listener,” the power of storytelling and self-mythologizing become inspirations for lingering uncertainties and mental disintegrations.
In the movie, the hero is Gabriel Noone (Williams), a gay writer who shares his fiction installments on his midnight public radio program “Noone at Night.” We learn at the film’s start that his relationship with the lovely Jess (Bobby Cannavale, who also played Will’s boyfriend on “Will & Grace”) is going into that “we need to be apart for a while” phase which usually spells doom for a couple’s future.
Gabriel gets an advanced version of a book from his publisher who asks him to write an endorsement for the cover. In a lonely house and with a broken heart, Gabriel reads the story of a young boy, Pete (Rory Culkin, Macaulay’s younger brother), who is sexually abused by his parents and a host of their reprehensible friends. Pete was infected with HIV during the chronic abuse, and he’s now living with AIDS.
Moved by the boy’s horrific story and the top-notch quality of the writing, Gabriel gets Pete’s number, and the two strike up a relationship by phone. Pete is especially touched by this relationship, because he listened to Gabriel’s show nightly as a child, a pole star of sanity during his twisted upbringing.
Gabriel comes to think of himself as a father to young Pete, and Pete returns the affection. His now-adoptive mother Donna (Collette) is thrilled with their budding relationship, and everything seems sweet and lovely.
That is until Jess throws back the curtain, casting doubt and eventual destruction on this 21st century Ozzie and Harriet. On one of his visits to the house, Jess talks to both Pete and Donna on the phone, and he comes up with a horrifying recognition: they’re the same person.
This gnawing seed of doubt eats away at Gabriel, especially when he discovers no one has ever met or seen Pete. Gabriel tries to visit the boy and Donna at their Wisconsin home, but Donna says Pete is always too sick to see visitors.
Woven through the dark hallways of the story is Gabriel’s desire to believe in this child. His need for a constant love is stripped from his life as Jess retreats more and more, and as Pete becomes the creation of a deranged mind, Gabriel recognizes his own delusional ability to believe in whatever makes his life more bearable.
THE BOOK IS less dark than the film, but the manner in which the novel unravels is more ambiguous.
“Somehow the storylines are able to amble in [the book],” Stettner says. “In a film, once you get up to that level of tension, you can’t not deliver.” This is only Stettner’s third film as a director, following up the 2001 Stockard Channing drama “The Business of Strangers.”
Maupin himself understands the limits of the cinematic genre, having worked on screen versions of his wildly popular “Tales of the City” book installments. The first miniseries, “Tales of the City,” was created for PBS in 1993 and was quickly followed by “More Tales of the City” and “Further Tales of the City” in 1998 and 2001 for cable’s Showtime.
“I’ve been spoiled up until now,” says Maupin of the extended format afforded in a miniseries. “You’ve got an hour and a half to create a movie. Some strains of the story are going to have to go.”
The book progresses at a steady clip, commanding the reader’s attention with an imaginative vice-grip and compelling curiosity. However, adapting the pages devoted to the crumbling relationship between Jess and Gabriel might have proved tedious to a movie audience, and pivotal scenes between Gabriel and his father make only a ...
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