Director: Steve Buscemi
Writer: Alessandro Camon
Stars: Tessa Thompson, Logan Marshall-Green, Margaret Cho
Synopsis: Follows a helpline volunteer who is part of the small army that gets on the phone every night, fielding calls from all kinds of people feeling lonely, broken, etc.
“Call back anytime, ask for Beth”
Legendary actor Steve Buscemi steps behind the camera to direct The Listener written by Alessandro Camon. The “listener” is Beth (Tessa Thompson — the only person to appear on camera in the film). She is doing late night shifts on a peer supported crisis hotline. Calls aren’t traced, both the caller and the listener are anonymous. The film documents a single night in “Beth’s” life and gradually reveals who she is; while immediately grappling with division, loneliness, anxiety, fear, and disconnection in American society.
Beth is awake staring at the ceiling before her alarm goes off. She greets her dog, brushes her teeth, puts on a strong pot of coffee. Her fingers click against her coffee cup. She is readying herself for her “day.” Buscemi gives the audience a sense that for a long time, especially since the pandemic, this has been her life. Perhaps it has been her life longer than that.
She sits down and prepares for her first call. It is from Michael (Logan Marshall-Green) who has not been long out of prison. He can’t sleep. So used to institutional time, he is lost in his freedom. For Michael the pandemic was “Prison Time,” — the days drag on forever but as night comes you can’t recall anything you did. He speaks of how he didn’t understand that he would need a mask when coronavirus hit. He used a bandana. He wondered if he would be shot by the police or assumed to be holding up a store because he has “criminal” written all over him. Beth is gentle with him. She allows him to tell her his story. How he ended up in prison. How generations of poverty and crime led him as a six-year-old to start running with gangs. “I’m not a bad person,” he tells Beth. “I know,” she replies. They laugh a little and Beth tells him to get some sleep and thanks him for giving her the “full picture.” He doesn’t want material assistance from Beth — no organizations. Just someone to hear him.
Over the course of the evening Beth will take many calls. One from Ellis (Ricky Velez), a hateful incel who is mouthing all the online rhetoric. He’s aggressive with Beth. He speaks of the terrible things he has done, including deepfake porn to get revenge on a girl who didn’t acknowledge his existence. As much as Beth tries to connect with Ellis, that isn’t what he wants. He wants to brag, talk about his status as a victim of “the system” which excludes him from being able to fulfil his “biological needs.” He is quite legitimately dangerous. He works in IT and has already hacked school servers to show extreme pornography and violence. He then begins to masturbate when Beth tries to convince him he can turn his knowledge and skills into something positive and productive.
There are a number of calls which are supposed to be the big impact moment. The long discussion Beth has with a PTSD riddled soldier Ray (Jamie Hector) and his dream about a boot which connects his physical and psychological injuries. A discussion with Chris (Bobby Soto), a cop who talks about deliberate police violence and cover-ups on the force. How he has to balance his own safety and his gnawing conscience after he witnessed an unprovoked attack by a fellow officer which left a man permanently disabled. Unfortunately, Camon’s reiteration of systemic law enforcement corruption and American wartime interventions and the cost involved bloats rather than adds to the film. Ray’s section is too long. Beth’s responses are more interesting than the well-trod narratives Camon is proffering as commentary on America.
Where Camon could have spent more time is with Corinne (Margaret Cho). A mother describing how she is at the end of her tether is one of the quiet gut-punches which is also one of the loudest indictments of how America has let vulnerable people down. She tells Beth she’s always a “day late and a dollar short.” When Beth responds that sometimes everyone feels like that, Corinne scoffs that she doubts that Oprah or Mrs. Zuckerberg do. When Beth tries to explain they probably have bad days because they’re human, Corinne lays out her lived reality. She’s the full-time carer for a special needs child. Her husband has lost more hours at work. He does nothing but aimlessly drink and sit around. Corinne is terrified what will happen to her child if something were to happen to her. Who will be there?
A call from Jinx (Blu del Barrio), an unhoused teen who is “celebrating” her eighteenth birthday is a street level horror story. Jinx ran away from home at sixteen for the grand adventure with some friends. They flaked, disappeared, and now she’s a step away from being pimped out by her drug addicted and violent “boyfriend”. She doesn’t know where to place her rage and fear. She’s convinced she will be dead soon, but she’s clawing to survive. When she hangs up Beth just stares hopelessly into the distance.
Two calls, both from women, are the key to who the listener is. The first comes from Sharon (Alia Shawkat) who starts the conversation with “I am mentally ill, I am mental, I like that word, it’s like metal.” No health insurance means Sharon is unmedicated, without a doctor or psychiatrist. She’s avoiding official crisis lines because she doesn’t want to be committed. She’s aggressive, funny, expressive, and scared. “I’m having one of my episodes, my bones are snakes… my bones are snakes.” She claims she is synesthetic. She can see Beth’s voice. She can smell her over the phone. Her “lunatic ramblings” are infused with a rhythmic genius. Beth deals with Sharon’s rapid cycling mood swings which go from the grandiose, to paranoid, catastrophizing, aggressive, whimsical, and defeated. Sharon is the poster child for “danger to self and others” but Beth handles her with velvet gloves. What if she can give Sharon another avenue to help calm the noise? What if Sharon’s fast meter brain (she calls it Brian because it’s out of order) can be put to a beat which gives the intrusive thoughts a specific measure of time?
The final call is the “truth telling.” An educated voice (Rebecca Hall) on the other end of the line launches in by asking Beth how she is. Beth is somewhat shocked because no one has asked her that question for a long time and demanded an answer. Beth demurs and tries to keep the conversation focused on her caller. Laura, as we find out later, has planned her suicide. She’s not particularly interested in being talked out of it. As a now fired professor of sociology, and broke from a divorce, she has rationally crunched the numbers and has tallied the pros and cons of the emotional and financial cost of living.
For Laura it just no longer adds up. She has no friends, she has no job, soon she will have nowhere to live. No one will miss her. She has worked all her life and only added to what she sees as the “delusion” of hope. There are so many crises everyone has lost count. How can she tell young people that learning about the world only leads to knowing how little difference they make?
Laura’s curiosity homes in on Beth and why she keeps listening. Taking on the trauma of others. Laura knows that the program is peer related so in some manner Beth has undergone some form of social rehabilitation herself. What is she punishing herself over?
Laura and Beth’s conversation is a philosophical tug of war with Laura’s stunning intellectual prowess and Beth’s own measured and empathetic reasoning behind why people should not give up. Laura talks about the attrition of living. The mask people put on to hide their dissatisfaction. “Your unhappiness is ashamed of itself”. Living on a planet which has already committed suicide.
Beth simply responds, “Everything means something.” The reason to be alive is to find that one small thing which means you have to get out of bed each day. Self annihilation happens in a multitude of ways. Beth experienced it. She didn’t actively have a plan to kill herself, but she also didn’t care if she died. She did things that meant she could at any moment and didn’t care.
What Beth gets out of the program is an escape from herself. A chance to put her focus on someone else one hundred percent for however long she has with the caller. What hurts her the most is when they hang up before the conversation is over. Before she knows if she did help. Laura wants a reason to live. Beth says she has no real wisdom but tells her story. She tells the truth to the woman who is a truth teller.
Beth tells Laura she could be of benefit to the crisis line. Laura laughs. How can her cynicism help anyone? Why would she join the “Lonely Hearts Club”? Humans are more connected than ever though the internet and news, but they have never felt more alone. Beth has reminded Laura she has a heart even if it is broken. “Loneliness is a slut,” Laura laughs. Beth says she is going to steal that line.
A final call comes through. It’s Sharon with her rap. It is brilliant just as Beth suspected it would be, and Sharon’s final lines “no one has very long, so keep on writing this song,” is a summation of what Camon was trying to get across. If he had cut some of the flabbier parts of the narrative the film would be much better for it.
Steve Buscemi proves himself very adept with the camera. He knows what to show and when. Everything rests on Tessa Thompson’s prodigious talent. Her face and eyes. Her soft voice. Her compassion and obvious pain. The sound design is excellent. We know there is a world “on fire” outside Beth’s window. Not just from the calls she receives but from the sounds of sirens, choppers, and people screaming in anger. Beth’s response to everything has been to cocoon. To be “Beth” and stay inside. To keep living her prison time. To eat cheap noodles with one hand while playing with stress balls in the other.
To paraphrase Nan Goldin’s sister Barbara who committed suicide, for “All the beauty and the bloodshed” of twenty-first century living — there is a sliver of hope coming out of Pandora’s box. Curiosity, and empathy can keep one going when everything else is too much. Or simply a dog whose bark caught someone’s attention one day and led to their life being radically changed. Buscemi’s final shot is one of Beth doing the “something” that reclaimed her sense of self.
Despite the uneven scripting, Tessa Thompson, the excellent voice cast (Hall and Shawkat are standouts), and the formal aspects of Buscemi’s film and make The Listener a meaningful work, if not a masterpiece.
