Robin Williams made his name as a frenetic comic actor in movies such as Good Morning Vietnam — and certainly that film displays his awesome talent for an off-the-wall monologue. But he has long alternated the comedies (some of them, like Mrs Doubtfire, clearly beneath him) with more serious roles, and these days seems to be focusing chiefly on playing it straight.
The Night Listener is the latest such Williams vehicle, though here he’s not entirely playing it straight: he is a gay broadcaster who reads quirkily autobiographical pieces on a radio show — rather like the author of the novel on which the movie is based, Armistead Maupin, famous for his Tales of the City, which started as a newspaper serial. The plot of The Night Listener is based, too, on something that happened to Maupin himself, and to another writer, Paul Monette, as well as Oprah Winfrey: all were drawn into the drama of a youngster calling himself Anthony Godby Johnson, the purported author of a book called A Rock and a Hard Place, published in 1993.
Gabriel, the Maupin figure played by Williams in The Night Listener, is at a crisis point: his long-time lover is moving out, leaving the situation somewhat ambiguous, and Gabriel feels burnt out and empty when it comes to his work. Hoping to give him a bit of mental stimulation, a publisher friend hands him the manuscript of an about-to-be-published book — an example of what has come to be called, in the trade, a misery memoir.
The work is by a 14-year-old boy, revealing an early life of heart-rending trauma. In the present, the boy, Pete (Rory Culkin), is dying of Aids, and is living with an off-beat foster mother (Toni Collette), who mediates between Gabriel and the boy. It feels to Gabriel like he has just embarked on a major new relationship. But, spurred by his suspicious ex, Gabriel begins to entertain doubts. Is the boy who he says he is? And so he goes on a quest that is as much about the truth about Pete as it is about finding and dealing with his own pain.
The Night Listener makes engrossing viewing, especially as it gets increasingly noir in flavour, and containing as it does a strong central performance from Williams — perhaps the best of his recent “serious” roles. And it raises, almost allegorically, questions about the kind of misery memoir that, of late, has been revealed as more fiction than fact. But The Night Listener needed to push the storyline and the implications of it all further, I think; there are places it could have gone, but seemed to be holding back — a bit like Williams himself.
Perhaps that’s because the real-life story has no resolution: in 14 years, no investigator has found a real person who can be identified as Anthony Godby Johnson. In which case, Maupin, writing his novel about the imbroglio, should have stretched his imaginative muscles and taken the story further. If the Johnson memoir is really fiction, then Maupin’s novel (and the movie, which he co-scripted), is not fictional enough.