Standing between Steve Buscemi’s newest directorial effort, “The Listener,” and his last time on the director’s chair for the Sienna Miller-starring drama “Interview” is a whopping 15 years. Buscemi has been open about his desire to direct again, but nothing seemed to work out until Oscar-nominated writer Alessandro Camon knocked on his door, script in hand. Timing, ever-elusive, showed its poignant hand: this story about a helpline volunteer ended up leading Buscemi to call one himself, a decision he claimed helped him process the recent death of his wife of 30 years, filmmaker and choreographer Jo Andres. “I had an amazing 15-minute conversation with this person. I’ll never know who he was and never tell her who I was. I talked about Jo, and it was important to me, and it was the genesis of the film,” he said of his personal connection to the subject.
Tessa Thompson takes on the only onscreen role in “The Listener,” the one of quietly composed Beth. She works the dreaded graveyard shift at the helpline, her unceasing motion juxtaposed to the stillness that lies outside the window as the dark curtain of night envelops the city. Beth prances back and forth across the spacious house where the film takes place, anxiously curling her body into itself in search of comfort that never comes.
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The actress harnesses the camera’s permanent gaze to tap into the qualities that granted her wide acclaim for her turn in Rebecca Hall’s 2021 directorial debut “Passing.” A flickering of the eyelid, a gentle nod of the head, it all goes a long way when employed by Thompson to react to a stimulus that lies outside of the diegesis. Her voice, monotonous to reflect the emotional blank slate required of helpline volunteers, shows subtle spikes in tone when challenged with information that comes as a vicious curveball. A young girl relays to her the harrowing ins and outs of her abusive relationship; an incel recalls how he edited the face of the woman who shunned him onto a pornographic video, and an ex-con poses questions on whether or not the concept of rehabilitation is a farce.
Sadly, Thompson’s competent performance stands little chance against the ineptitude of the half-baked script, which relies on disengaged overexposure as a cheap attempt at emotional engagement. Camon and Buscemi don’t seem to grasp the extra effort needed to shape credible characters without the help of visual aids; the capable cast brought in to do the voice work (Rebecca Hall, Alia Shawkat, Logan Marshall-Green, and Margaret Cho amongst them) promptly wasted by consistently one-dimensional writing. The result is an odd disconnection between the words being said and how they land; the people behind the telephone are not only nameless but devoid of any tangibility.
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The best example at hand is a Sociology professor who calls the helpline to expand on the notion of suicide as the epitome of enlightenment. “The only way to proclaim your life as yours is to actually end it,” she offers, echoing French philosopher Albert Camus in his definition of suicide as “the one really serious philosophical problem.” It is fitting that the character chosen to offer a rational point of view on the emotionally charged issue is a Sociology professor, with another famous French philosopher, Émile Durkheim, coining the modern science of social studies through the examination of suicide as a reflection on the direct impact of the collective on the personal.
“The Listener” attempts to tackle the same subject, nodding at the relentless succession of collective tragedies that has turned the news cycle into a twisted menu of assorted forms of punishment. The isolation brought by the COVID-19 pandemic aggravated the already struggling social body, a fact that is presented here as coldly as the academic tone of the last paragraph. Nuanced issues such as mass incarceration, hate crimes, police brutality, and sex trafficking are employed to emphasize a point that requires no such effort. That misplaced energy is the ultimate downfall of Buscemi’s well-intentioned affair, which lacks the warm empathy of his work as an actor while also failing to showcase his voice as a director. By the time the film, at last, reaches its much-teased reveal, the benefit of the doubt has been long exhausted. It is a shame as hidden somewhere within the empty cacophony of “The Listener” lies a message that deserves to be heard. [C-]
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