In 1993, Anthony Godby Johnson published Rock and A Hard Place; One Boy’s Triumphant Story, a horrific autobiography describing his survival of an abusive childhood. Growing up with parents who beat him and let their friends rape him, he discovered at age 11, having been adopted by a nicer couple, that he had contracted AIDS. When journalist Keith Olbermann and author Armistead Maupin sought to meet Anthony, they contacted the woman who claimed to be his adoptive mother, “Vicki Johnson”. Suddenly they realised no one had ever seen either Anthony or Vicki. The book, it transpired, more properly belonged in the fiction section.
It was a great literary hoax, up there with Jaycee Nicole and JT LeRoy, and became the basis for Maupin’s novel The Night Listener, now a Sundance hit from director Patrick Stettner. As a film, it’s superbly suspenseful. Toni Collette is an absolute fright as the alleged adoptive mother. More surprisingly, there’s a decent central performance from Robin Williams, who suppresses his urge to gurn mournfully far more than we would have expected.
Being a festival hit, Sandra Oh (the Oh stands for Oh, it must be an indie film) makes an obligatory appearance, but other hallmarks from that sector are rather less successful. Stettner’s film looks cheap and dark, often resembling an Australian soap opera from the 70s more than a movie. They seem to have run out of film stock for certain vague subplots involving Williams’ ex-lover and strained familial arrangements. That’s almost certainly for the best, but a better idea might have been to ditch this material altogether.
Still, this is compelling viewing and one can’t wait to see what Stettner does without the restrictive budgetary constraints.