The Night Listener

Based on Armistead Maupin's novel of the same title "The Night Listener" has Robin Williams play Gabriel Noone a gay public radio storyteller who strikes up a telephone relationship with a 14-year-old boy author of a soon-to-be-published memoir about a childhood of sexual abuse. Gabriel comes to harbor suspicions about the boy’s circumstances with his adopted mother Donna (Toni Colette) and meets with a series of surprises when he travels to the woman’s Midwest home to personally meet the boy named Pete. The film’s over-leveraged plot imparts diminishing results as its predictable revelation arrives with an unsatisfying anticlimax.

Rated R. 82 mins. (C-) (Two Stars)