By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
A Good 'Listener': Stettner Premieres Mystery with Collette, Maupin
This first weekend at Sundance is totally nuts, with anticipation levels surpassed only by the sheer volume of people squeezing into theaters and wait lines to catch dozens on dozens of premieres. Take Saturday night’s Eccles Theater showing of The Night Listener, with about 1,300 filmgoers packed in for Patrick Stettner’s tale of a late-night New York radio show host ensnared in a phone relationship with a mysterious young fan. Star Robin Williams was a no-show (Stettner passed along Williams’s “crazy love” from the actor’s location shoot in Canada), but co-star Toni Collette and writers Armistead Maupin and Terry Anderson made the trip and greeted their audience following the screening.
As the caretaker of Williams’s ill phone friend–a 14-year-old who styles a gripping, soon-to-be-published abuse memoir of increasingly questionable veracity–Collette disappears into blindness, loneliness, clinginess and a general devastation that is as creepy as any of the dark revelations Williams discovers in his quest to track young Pete down. “The story was just so unbelievably intense,” Collette said when asked how she prepared. “I think basically this woman is very needy and wants love, and I think it’s a very basic need to take it to the nth degree. I feel sorry for her. And I don’t know how I prepared for it.”
Stettner jumped to the podium. “She’s Toni Collette,” he said. “She can do anything.”
There you have it. I, on the other hand, am fairly limited in what I can disclose without giving the story away, although I can safely say that Lisa Rinzler’s cinematography triumphs mightily in a gorgeous duel with underexposure, yielding a dark, saturated color palette you might have expected had Gordon Willis shot a Hitchcock film. And on a semi-related note for those of you Maupin fans reading from Park City, the ever-engaging storyteller will be signing books Monday morning at Dolly’s Bookstore on Main Street. The fun starts at 11 a.m., and here is hoping your wait line moves a little more fluidly than those at the theaters. It is about time you got a break.