The Night Listener (2006) Life is Beautiful with Robin Williams (vol.5)
“How can I be missing someone who never existed?”
As Peter Nashel’s simple piano and recorder-like musical score accompanies the opening credits of an ever changing reflective and symmetrical image growing larger and larger until it fills the screen, we dissolve from a fade to black to a simple “Inspired by True Events” amid the faint sounds of feedback from a microphone, a squeaking chair, the rustle of papers, and…
“From the studios of WNYH in New York City I’m Gabriel Noone and this is “Noone at Night”. As a storyteller, I’ve spent years looting my life for fiction. Like a magpie, I tend to steal the shiny stuff and discard the rest”
During this opening narration and “Gabriel Noone” (Robin Williams) recording an episode for his New York City radio show, we cut to a dimly lit bedroom as Gabriel continues:
“The facts can always be altered when telling the story. This time, I have to be careful. I’ll lay out the events exactly as I remember them. I want you to believe this after all. That’ll be hard enough as it is. This one is called “The Night Listener”
Before we fade to black and during the above narration as Gabriel records the beginning of his story into a microphone in a darkened studio, we have returned once more to that dimly lit bedroom and a barely seen blonde haired figure walking the bedroom, listening to the radio.
The time is 11.00pm:
“It began in the worst of all possible weeks. Jess had moved out, saying it was only temporary, but I was miserable and nothing made sense anymore. I was trying to read one of my ridiculous yarns. The kind I’d made a career on, a sentimental piece on our 8th anniversary. But it felt so phony, I couldn’t put the words into my mouth…”
Throughout the above continuing narration, director Patrick Stettner has circled his camera around Gabriel as he reads, not this narration but perhaps the story itself, before stopping and exclaiming with a sigh “this isn’t working” and “this doesn’t sound like me”. After claiming he sounds “fake” to a studio technician recording his story in a nearby booth, Gabriel raises himself from the studio desk and clearly upset, leaves the darkness of the studio and almost immediately bumps into his friend, colleague and possibly an executive at the studio “Ashe” (Joe Morton) on the street leading to the studio. Ashe is worried for his friend, the studio too as he reminds Gabriel the studio is “owed five shows” and whilst Gabriel assures him he’s OK, Ashe passes him a book he believes he may be interested in and which may fire his creative juices.
Arriving home, Gabriel awkwardly walks in on his ex partner “Jess” (Bobby Cannavale) and a friend he angrily and dismissively calls “Lucifer” carrying boxes out of the home they used to share. As “Hugo” the dog reluctantly stays, so too does a heartbroken Gabriel as his ex lover leaves before we cut to a slow camera move in on Gabriel later in the evening as he silently and quietly sits at his writing desk with only a picture of him and Jess, the incessant ticking of an unseen clock and loud rumbles of thunder for company. As the thunder continues, Gabriel now settles himself on a sofa with the book given to him by Ashe, and…
“Charles Dickens wrote Pete Logand was only 12 when his parents sent him to make boot polish in a factory by the docks. This screwed him up forever and made him a writer. I think we’ve all got a blacking factory, some terrible something that makes us lose our baby heart as surely as we lose our baby teeth”
As Gabriel’s narration and reading of the book reaches the words “baby teeth”, so this merges with a narration from someone else who continues where Gabriel left off:
“Mine were in the basement in Milwaukee. It was converted into a room that was supposed to be a playhouse. No wonder Mum and Dad made it soundproof. I knew all their games by the time I was 7. By the time I was 11, other grown-ups were with them. I wondered where was my Mum? Then one night I heard her right there in the playhouse”
During this continuing narration and separate reading of the same book, a young blindfolded boy has been led into a dark, underground room. Following an extreme close-up on the boy’s eyeball, the narration/reading of the book returns to Gabriel:
“Then I realised she was there all along. That was what the blindfold was for, to keep me hidden. So they could sell the tapes on the internet”
We cut to various and quickly edited images as seen by the boy through the slit of his blindfold: young girls, blindfolded too possibly, in only their underwear, barely dressed adults drunkenly cavorting, laughing, smiling, in a darkened room full of despicable human abuse.
Gabriel’s telephone rings, shaking him from the shocking words on the pages of a book that will lead him to another story for his radio show, and into the depths of despair…
“Gabriel Noone” (Robin Williams) A strong performance from Robin in a so-so film that although inspired by real life events felt a little forced from the halfway mark and even before then, I’d guessed the obvious reveal. Unlike Robin’s character here, I’m no amateur sleuth as you don’t have to be to guess the twist as nearly every main character (and especially so Bobby Cannavale as “Jess” and Sandra Oh as “Anna”) allude to the obvious reveal early in the film. Yet it’s obvious to nearly everyone except for Robin’s character “Gabriel”, a golden hearted if recently heartbroken character in the story of his own life he mines for his radio show, regardless of the repercussions.
A film in the latter part of Robin’s career that could and should have been thrilling but which ultimately won’t live long in the memory.
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.
Whilst you’re here I may as well brag about the release of my trilogy of recently self-published books. Beautiful covers eh! As the title(s) would suggest, this is my life at the movies or at least from 1980 to 2024, and in volume 1 you’ll find 80 spoiler free appraisals of movies from debut filmmakers, 91 of the very best films appraised with love and absent of spoilers from 1990–2024 in volume 2, and in volume 3 you’ll find career “specials” on Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino together with the very best of the rest and another 87 spoiler free film reviews from 2001–2024.
All available in hardback and paperback and here are some handy links:
"A Life at the Movies Vol.1" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.2" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.3" - link to Amazon