A single-actor, single-location chamber piece that unfolds over a single night, Steve Buscemi’s The Listener is an alluring package on paper, even if it ultimately proves more interesting for its formal austerity than for its low-voltage drama. With ever-watchable screen queen Tessa Thompson as star, and actor-director Buscemi back behind the camera for the first time in 15 years, this Venice and Toronto world premiere is guaranteed plenty of buzz anyway.
The Listener was written by Alessandro Camon, a seasoned producer with just a handful of screenplay credits to date, most notably Oren Moverman’s The Messenger (2009). The episodic story may lack the mounting tension and emotional gut-punch that characterised other one-person dramas in a similar vein, such as Locke (2013) or The Guilty (2018), but it works as a modestly engaging stylistic experiment and a heartfelt light-touch commentary on the post-traumatic aftershocks of the Covid pandemic. Thompson’s blossoming star profile and Buscemi’s highly respected track record should attract curious audiences and sales interest following its Lido launch as closing film in the Venice Days sidebar.
Thompson plays Beth, a crisis helpline volunteer just beginning her regular night shift of trying to sooth the troubled souls of strangers down the line from her modest LA apartment. Each caller has a different set of problems: an ex-convict struggling with life outside prison, a homeless teenage runaway with a controlling pimp boyfriend, a former U.S. Marine haunted by the innocent citizens he killed in battle, a mentally fragile young woman struggling with suicidal thoughts, and so on. The unseen vocal support cast here includes Margaret Cho, Blu Del Barrio and Alia Shawkat, all doing solid work but mostly confined to reductive, on-the-nose, issue-based character sketches.
Some of these vignettes contain more latent dramatic potential than others. A sheriff tortured by an unspoken oath of loyalty to his homicidal racist colleagues, and a toxic “Men’s Rights” type driven to commit horrible acts by his own self-loathing, both throw up rich and timely themes that deserve more screen time. Likewise Beth’s own backstory, which we eventually come to learn contains plenty of pain and trauma, feels like a brisk checklist of psychological scars more than realistic character-building. Midway through, The Listener starts to feel like a movie version of the REM song Everybody Hurts, well-intentioned in its universal empathy but ultimately a little too trite and shallow to make much of an emotional impact.
The last and longest of Beth’s calls comes from British college professor Laura, voiced by Rebecca Hall, who directed Thompson in Passing (2021). Trapped in a deep well of existential despair, Laura is coolly weighing up whether to end her own life. She is also self-aware, witty and intellectually agile enough to demolish Beth’s glib arguments for staying alive, which transforms their conversation from calm therapy session to gladiatorial mental combat.
“There is no free will, it’s all an illusion,” Laura sneers. “The entire human race has already committed suicide, they just don’t know it yet.” Beth responds with fluffy homilies: “Isn’t suffering just the other side of happiness? Isn’t loss just the other side of love?” This stagey exchange of undergraduate philosophy stretches the film’s default low-key naturalism to breaking point, but it also lends the screenplay a welcome patina of intellectual ambition. More of this sparky verbal sparring might have given The Listener some much-needed heft and bite, elevating it above the level of lukewarm empathy festival.
In fairness to Buscemi and his team, The Listener is a solidly crafted effort for a low-budget feature shot in just one week. Credit is due to Thompson for giving up her brief holiday window between Westworld commitments, and for finding subtle grace notes in such an opaque, passive, thinly written lead character. Cinematographer Anka Malatynska manages to give the single nondescript late-night location a handsome Edward Hopper quality with painterly framing, melancholy shadows and a muted colour palette of blues and browns. The lush score, by LA-based Japanese composer Aska, has an agreeably twinkly warmth, but leans too far into syrupy sentimentality at times.
Peppered with glancing references to the Covid crisis, The Listener is scrappy as drama, but hard to fault in its noble intention to celebrate the healing power of human connection after years of sickness and isolation. Buscemi likens the post-pandemic mood in America to the aftermath of 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina. Touchingly, this project also has personal resonance for the director, whose wife Jo Andres died in 2019. In his Venice promotional interviews, Buscemi admits to calling helplines during pre-production, research for the film which turned into grief counselling. A final poignant credits dedication reads “For Jo.”
Director: Steve Buscemi
Screenplay: Alessandro Camon
Cast: Tessa Thompson
Cinematography: Anka Malatynska
Editing: Kate Williams
Producers: Wren Arthur, Steve Buscemi, Oren Moverman, Lauren Hantz, Bill Stertz, Sean King O’Grady, Tessa Thompson
Music: Aska
Production design: Mboni Maumba
Production companies: Hantz Motion Pictures (US), Olive Productions (US), Sight Unseen (US)
World sales: Bankside, UK
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Giornate degli Autori)
In English
96 minutes