Venice Review: Steve Buscemi’s ‘The Listener’
deadline.comIn his acting life, Steve Buscemi has certainly mixed things up, finding time for Bruckheimer/Simpson blockbusters, Pixar animation and even Adam Sandler movies in a bid to avoid typecasting as the definitive New York indie guy.
In his directing career, however, he tends to stick to a certain genre: small, intimate, personal films like his excellent 1996 debut Trees Lounge, which told the story of a melancholic underachiever whose life revolves around a seedy dive bar where the crowd of misfit regulars become his bizarre de facto family.
Loneliness is a familiar motif in Buscemi’s work, and he excelled himself with that in 2005’s Lonesome Jim, starring Casey Affleck as a young man who’s failed in the big city and now has to move in with his parents.The Listener, surprisingly only his fifth movie, contains elements of both these titles, starring Tessa Thompson as Beth, a helpline worker who lives alone in a sprawling city that is never named but looks a lot, in the closing scenes, like downtown Los Angeles.
Beth – not her real name – is a helpline volunteer who works through the night answering calls from people with problems, starting with a former hold-up guy, recently released from jail after lockdown, who finds it grimly amusing that he can no longer go into a shop without wearing a mask.
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