Tuned Out

I can't imagine what Harvey and Bob were thinking when they snapped up the exceptionally daft The Night Listener, unless they consider the sedate $3 million they paid for this dreary Robin Williams vehicle but a drop in their roomy bucket, which is shortly to be filled to overflowing by Sin City 2. As a performer, Williams has a wonderfully volatile range; as an actor, he commutes between over-sincere and over-sinister. Both modes are on full monochromatic display in this stolid noir thriller by Patrick Stettner (who made the overheated The Business of Strangers), based on a roman à clef by Armistead Maupin about a late-night radio talk show host who may or may not be the subject of an elaborate hoax. By turns unctuous and sulky, Williams spends most of the movie stumbling around nighttime rural Wisconsin, chasing or being chased by a pathetically misused Toni Collette as the blind putative guardian of a putative young victim (Rory Culkin) of child abuse.

No doubt les frères Weinstein will hitch their marketing campaign to the hullabaloo around recent hoaxters like James Frey. To me the movie is of interest only for its embrace — barely explored in a languid subplot about the talk show host's breakup with his boyfriend — of the eternal ambivalence of writers about tapping the lives of people they know and/or love for their work. I'm a case in point, being one of the few critics who thought that Noah Baumbach fetched his helpless, barely disguised parents a cruel hatchet job in The Squid and the Whale — even as I gear up for an essay on the family in cinema that I'm pretty sure will be the duller for not mining the troubles in my own family that turned me into a moviegoer in the first place. In the end this debate may be decided on matters of tone, but it gives me pause when far more burnished minds than my own, among them V.S. Naipaul and Marguerite Duras (neither one of them known for being nice or squeamish), held off writing about relatives until they were safely dead.