It’s at all times fascinating when a film with a prime star, and directed by one other star, goes as far underneath the radar as Steve Buscemi‘s “The Listener,” starring Tessa Thompson, has.
However within the case of this significantly mild film — obtainable on VOD now for $6.99 — perhaps that’s a part of its DNA. Just like the psychological well being helpline operator Thompson performs, it is a film that’s there in the event you want it: Quiet, considerate, and completely shunning the form of splashiness that the majority films are thought to require nowadays to face out.
“The Listener” premiered on the Venice Movie Competition in 2022, the place it was the closing evening movie of the Venice Days sidebar. On April 13, it was the closing evening movie of the Sarasota Movie Competition, out of competitors — on this over 18-month competition journey, it’s additionally made stops on the festivals in Vienna, Thessaloniki, Stockholm, The Hague, and Tribeca. And on March 29, it lastly hit VOD.
The movie takes place virtually completely in a small L.A. bungalow throughout one lengthy evening wherein Thompson begins a shift as a helpline operator taking name after name from people who find themselves determined, anxious, indignant, or simply want somebody to hear. She makes it clear at one level that she’s not an analyst. Just like the hospital chaplains in final 12 months’s empathetic masterpiece “A Nonetheless Small Voice,” she’s there merely to hear. In that documentary, one of many chaplains says, “Folks at all times say, ‘Don’t simply stand there, do one thing!’ However we invert that and say, ‘Don’t simply do one thing, stand there.’” That might describe the method of Thompson’s character, Beth, too.
She takes name after name, however the digital camera stays solely on Beth, by no means reducing to who’s on the opposite finish of the road: There’s Logan Marshall-Inexperienced as a man who lately received out of jail and jokes in regards to the strangeness he feels carrying a masks when procuring (that is very a lot a Covid film) as a result of he beforehand a wore a masks to rob a spot; Alia Shawkat as somebody coping with nervousness who Beth encourages to show her ramblings into poetry and comes again with a reasonably beautiful rap; and Rebecca Corridor as a sociology professor considering taking her life that evening. Corridor’s character will get probably the most time — about 25 minutes of this 96-minute movie — and there’s an apparent chemistry Thompson and Corridor have. That they had simply completed taking pictures Netflix’s Sundance hit “Passing” after they made this movie.
A few of these vignettes don’t fairly work, or simply immediately finish, and there’s a sense that among the conversations are plug-and-play interchangeable. However the screenplay from Alessandro Camon, who earned an Oscar nomination for his script with Oren Moverman for “The Messenger,” at all times prioritizes empathy over sensationalism. And Thompson’s efficiency is remarkably contained: Buscemi’s digital camera is basically locked on her for the complete working time, often in close-up, so, as she doesn’t at all times wish to inform the folks coming to her for assist what she actually feels, delicate particulars of her efficiency point out her emotional state. When one criminally disturbed man tells her a couple of revenge porn scheme he initiated, Thompson nonetheless retains her face clean, however the digital camera follows her hand as she reaches for a stress ball and offers it a squeeze.
It’s fascinating simply to look at Thompson throughout all these calls, generally sketching photographs from the conversations in her pocket book, generally searching a window or staring off into area, or making herself a cup of espresso. It feels very pure, at the same time as she and Buscemi clearly wanted cautious planning to make such a contained, dialogue-driven film cinematic. When Shawkat’s character declares she thinks she will inform what folks on the telephone scent like — and that Thompson’s Beth smells like “a fluffy cloud” — it’s throughout a 40-second stretch the place Thompson’s again is to the digital camera, and we don’t see her expression in any respect. That’s a second the late David Bordwell would love, as he talked at size in regards to the expressive potentialities of back-to-the-camera performing (as in Kurosawa’s early movie “The Most Lovely”).
By the point you end watching “The Listener,” it’s exhausting to not have an actual affection for Beth’s environs: the Tiffany lamp over her kitchen desk, the orange Lynchian glow of a desk mild, the entrance porch the place she takes a lot of her name with Corridor’s character. That is the form of stillness and smallness of element that may follow you.
Double Characteristic Suggestion: Pair “The Listener” with Sydney Pollack’s debut movie from 1965, “The Slender Thread,” which is streaming on Hoopla with a subscription, and obtainable for hire at $3.99 in every single place else. It’s a really related premise, although it finally ends up going far more within the path of a thriller: Sidney Poitier performs a psych scholar who moonlights as a suicide prevention helpline operator and takes a name from a despairing Anne Bancroft. On this case, the complete film is that this one dialog as Poitier not solely tries to maintain Bancroft engaged but in addition to provide emergency employees sufficient time to hint her name and save her in time.
There’s a ticking clock: She’s simply taken a deadly dose of drugs when she begins her dialog with Poitier. In “The Slender Thread” you do see the opposite finish of the decision, in addition to flashbacks to incidents Bancroft describes — a second the place she desecrates a little bit makeshift burial mound for a lifeless seagull on the seaside, is especially memorable — and it’s all scored by Quincy Jones in considered one of his early movie composing efforts. “The Slender Thread” did get two Oscar nominations (for Artwork Course and Costume Design), however in each sense it’s a movie that made little influence on the time of its launch. But it surely’s robust sufficient that, although often simply packaged because the B-movie flipside of double options in 1965, it’s developed a following over the a long time. Perhaps the identical will probably be true of “The Listener.”