The Soloist A Paramount release of a DreamWorks/Universal presentation, in association with StudioCanal and Participant Media of a Between Two Trees production, a Krasnoff/Foster Entertainment production, in association with Working Title Films. Produced by Gary Foster, Russ Krasnoff. Executive producers, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Jeff Skoll, Patricia Whitcher. Co-producers, Rikki Lea Bestall, Eric N. Heffron, Leeann Stonebreaker. Directed by Joe Wright. Screenplay, Susannah Grant, based on the book by Steve Lopez.
Nathaniel Ayers - Jamie Foxx Steve Lopez - Robert Downey Jr. Mary Weston - Catherine Keener Graham Claydon - Tom Hollander Jennifer Ayers - Lisagay Hamilton David Carter - Nelsan Ellis Leslie Bloom - Rachael Harris Curt Reynolds - Stephen Root Flo Ayers - Lorraine Toussaint
By TODD MCCARTHYNeither rarefied art film nor widely accessible inspirational drama, "The Soloist" falls between the cracks both creatively and commercially. Based on the real case of a newspaperman finding a former musical prodigy homeless on the streets of Los Angeles, Brit director Joe Wright's first American feature has moments of power and imagination, but the overworked style and heavy socially conscious bent exude an off-putting sense of self-importance, making for a picture that's more of a chore than a pleasure to sit through. Delayed from an original late 2008 release to an April 24 opening, this DreamWorks/Universal co-production, released Stateside by Paramount, will ride a short time on the names of co-stars Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr., but is an unlikely bet to stir up significant B.O. Charismatic and dynamic as they've been on any number of previous occasions, both Foxx and Downey seem to labor here as they grapple with roles viewers will find difficulty warming to. Downey, in particular, fails to find either outer charm or inner soul in Steve Lopez, the real-life Los Angeles Times columnist whose book (and prior columns) served as the basis for Susannah Grant's ambitious but short-falling screenplay. Ever distracted and preoccupied over his next deadline, the screen version of Lopez provides little in the way of a portal through which to view the outside world, and what's going on in his mind remains a mystery across two hours; crucially, given the melodious bombardment to come, we don't even know what he thinks of classical music.
Always choosing to over-elaborate rather than to simplify, the pic gratuitously opens on Lopez getting half his face grated by concrete in a bicycle accident, the better that he should look like a street guy himself when he encounters Nathaniel Ayers (Foxx) near the Times offices downtown. A motormouthed fellow in funny clothes whose stream-of-consciousness commentaries are sometimes coherent and sometimes not, Ayers would seem like someone to steer clear of but for the fact that he produces wondrous sounds from a two-stringed violin.
Lopez learns his discovery once studied at Juilliard and was a precocious cellist rather than a fiddler, while flashbacks reveal a budding teenage virtuoso whose adoring mother advises him that, "There is a whole world waiting for you." Lopez gets a good column out of it -- so good, in fact, that a reader is inspired to send along an unused cello, which Lopez duly presents to Ayers virtually in the shadow of Disney Hall.
Pic's overwrought nature is best exemplified by the scene in which the bereft man takes bow to cello for the first time in years. Ayers' pure, simple notes are soon accompanied on the soundtrack by a full orchestra in booming accompaniment, along with noble birds soaring above Los Angeles onscreen.
Unfortunately, what should at this point become a full-bodied story digresses and devolves into something closer to a case study. While hints of his incipient mental problems are divulged in flashbacks, a reluctant Ayers is dragged by Lopez to a skid-row shelter that's always surrounded by junkies, crazies and surlies. Lopez further arranges for cello lessons (with the principal cellist of the Los Angeles Symphony, no less), as well as an apartment where his uncertain cohort can practice and an entree to an L.A. Phil rehearsal that provokes in Ayers a photo-chemical reaction, resulting in his own private version of the Star Gate sequence in "2001: A Space Odyssey."
Relations between the two men fray as Ayers' resentment at being a charity case erupts into outright rebellion against his enabler, who himself decides he's had enough. At the same time, the pic strays precariously close to becoming a semi-documentary about the rehab center, reaching its embarrassing nadir when it shows a beaming Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (Marcos De Silvas) promising a ton of city money to the facility.
More agreeably, Esa Pekka-Salonen is fleetingly seen conducting at Disney Hall, which gets an impressive, if brief, bigscreen outing. Although partly shot in Cleveland (which scenes it's hard to tell), the action never leaves downtown Los Angeles. As in the recent "Crossing Over," overhead shots looking down at the city's concrete arteries crank up the portentous omniscience.
With an utterly different sort of character, Foxx, like Downey, seems locked in a box by Ayers; the actor capably catches all the outward manifestations of the genuinely debilitating mental illness that has thwarted a potentially brilliant musical career, but neither he nor the script offers anything beyond that to lend the man full dimension. The latent tragic resonance of art both achieved and lost has been sacrificed at the altar of prosaic, politically correct news reporting about the plight of the homeless, a choice underlined by end-credits statistics about the number of street people in Los Angeles.
At individual moments, Wright's direction has snap and precision, but the big-picture focus seems bifurcated and, ultimately, uncertain. Seamus McGarvey's widescreen lensing is bold and clear, while music and sound elements are ear-filling. With: Marcos De Silvas.
Camera (Deluxe color, Panavision widescreen), Seamus McGarvey; editor, Paul Tothill; music, Dario Marianelli; production designer, Sarah Greenwood; supervising art director, Gregory A. Berry; art director, Suzan Wexler; set designers, Andrew Birdzell, Roger Lundeen, Jim Wallis; set decorator, Julie K. Smith; costume designer, Jacqueline Durran; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS/SDDS), Jose Antonio Garcia; supervising sound editors/designers, Craig Berkey, Chris Scarabosio; visual effects supervisor, John Moffatt; visual effects, Double Negative; assistant director, Eric N. Heffron; second unit director, Thomas Q. Napper; second unit camera, Paul Babin, Christopher Moseley; casting, Francine Maisler. Reviewed at Paramount Studios, Los Angeles, March 10, 2009. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 117 MIN.
Credits Release Date: Apr 24, 2009; Rated: PG-13; Length: 109 Minutes; Genre: Drama; With: Robert Downey Jr.
By Owen Gleiberman Owen Gleiberman is a film critic for EW
On paper, The Soloist sounds like a classic softhearted middlebrow awards-bait movie. Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) is a homeless schizophrenic on the streets of Los Angeles whose outward dementia — mismatched clothing topped by full sequined jacket; hair plastered down on either side; a mode of ''talk'' that's really a jumble of word salad — conceals a delicate, refined soul obsessed with the beauty of music. Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times who meets Nathaniel on the street and learns, after a bit of investigating, that he was once a budding cello virtuoso at Juilliard. He writes a column about him, and as Nathaniel starts to gain a bit of notoriety, the two men redeem each other. Or not.
The Soloist is based on a true story, but it takes pains not to sweeten the facts. And so the film, directed by Joe Wright (Atonement), draws us in without offering the expected ''inspirational'' catharsis. It's all a bit shapeless, yet made with sincerity and taste, and the two actors seize your sympathy. Downey plays Lopez with a missionary zeal but never sanctifies him, and Foxx gives a lyrical performance as a man so trapped in a whirlpool of feeling (there's a hint that the inner voices he conjures up are racial demons) that he can't connect with anything but Beethoven. His madness has removed all impediments to bliss, and Foxx is such a good actor you can just about hear the music in his head. B
Posts: 5431 | Location: "Stay Classy San Diego!" | Registered: June 15, 2006
I prefer Gleiberman's take on this film. I wanted to see this last year, although, I remain skeptical about whether I'll like it. As for McCarthy, heaven forbid that any film viewer need be reminded of homelessness, musical genius, or social issues. O no. We cant have that. Everything MUST remain subtle.
Posts: 13935 | Location: canada | Registered: December 22, 2005
A very positive review from The Hollywood Reporter.
FILM REVIEWS Film Review: The Soloist
By Kirk Honeycutt, April 16, 2009 02:00 ET
Cast and Crew Executive Producer: Patricia Whitcher Executive Producer: Tim Bevan Producer: Gary Foster Producer: Russ Krasnoff Co-producer: Rikki Bestall Director: John Wright Screen Writer: Susannah Grant Director of Photography: Seamus McGarvey Editor: Paul Tothill Unit Prod. Manager: Patricia Whitcher First Assistant Director: Eric Heffron Prod. Designer: Sarah Greenwood Art Director: Greg Berry Set Decorator: Katie Spencer Costume Designer: Jaqueline Durran Prod. Coordinator: Robert Mazaraki Special Effects: Donald Frazee Sound mixer: Jose A. Garcia Casting director: Francine Maisler Unit Publicist: Alex L. Worman Cast: Jamie Foxx (Actor), Robert Downey Jr. (Actor), Catherine Keener (Actor), Lisa Gay Hamilton (Actor), Nelsan Ellis (Actor), Tom Hollander (Actor), Justin Martin (Actor), Rachael Harris (Actor), Stephen Root (Actor)
Bottom Line: Excellent if flawed film version of LA Times columnist Steve Lopez's series on his relationship with a schizophrenic homeless man.
Steve Lopez's columns in the Los Angeles Times about his relationship with Nathaniel Ayers, a schizophrenic homeless man who once studied music at Juillard, eventually turned into a highly praised book and now a movie, "The Soloist." This film version takes a somewhat romanticized view of both journalism and skid row yet is nevertheless a compassionate and compelling look at mental illness. Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx are on fire in the lead roles: They're both charismatic as hell without sacrificing any of the emotional honesty necessary for you to believe that these movie stars are a scruffy reporter and a mentally ill musician.
"The Soloist" should hit the target for older adult audiences, perhaps sharing the demographic that made a boxoffice success of "A Beautiful Mind" -- a similar, but in the end, a much different look at schizophrenia. When the film's release got postponed from late fall 2008 to this year, there was talk about how Downey and Foxx would miss possible Oscar noms by this date change. True, Academy members tend to remember only the last three months of a year when voting, but these performances are extraordinary enough that the memory should not fade by fall.
Making his first film in America, British director Joe Wright ("Atonement") is intrigued by the other side of glamorous L.A., the downtown skid row district where hundreds of homeless people and families must find shelter each night and where Steve Lopez found the story of a lifetime.
As Lopez himself has pointed out in a column, the "Steve Lopez" in this film bears only a faint resemblance to his actual self. He is, in fact, married and not divorced as Susannah Grant's screenplay insists. Apparently being married didn't fit the filmmakers' image of an old-school newspaper columnist -- who must be a rumpled curmudgeon whose personal is life a mess but has time to hit bars to down shots and think mighty thoughts.
Otherwise, the film does accurately follow the trajectory of his relationship with Ayers, starting with their first meeting where, as a professional journalist, he coolly calculates the possibilities of a column about a homeless man who clearly knows how to play a ragged, two-string violin. When Nathaniel's story checks out -- he was a child prodigy in Cleveland and did attend Julliard until mental illness set in -- Steve gets his column.
The huge response that single column by readers all but forces him to participate in Nathaniel's life, first by delivering the musical instruments sent from readers (reduced to a single cello here) and then to secure housing, medical treatment and even lessons from a Philharmonic member. What Steve discovers is that nothing he will do can truly "cure" Nathaniel, but by being a friend, by watching his back, he can do considerable good.
Along the way, Steve himself learns an important lesson in courage and humility. He may even get back together with that ex-wife and fellow journalist (played well by Catherine Keener but it's a pretty thankless role). And his encounters with the extreme living conditions and governmental indifference to homeless conditions in downtown enrage him.
The film plays the skid row scene like something out of 1948's "The Shake Pit" with extras encouraged to act out frightening psychoses and criminality. Whatever the theatricality of this scene, the movie does show -- as indeed was the case -- that because of Lopez's columns, the mayor and other officials did a major re-think about the city's attitude toward the homeless and how they are treated.
While the film never asks to what degree Lopez's relationship with Nathaniel is self-serving if not exploitative, Downey's take on the columnist is not always sympathetic. He plays "Steve Lopez" as sometimes abrupt and testy, even resisting if not resenting how he gets dragged into his subject's life.
Since few viewers know Nathaniel Ayers, it's impossible to debate the accuracy of Foxx's performance, but he certainly gets across the man's intelligence and humanity as he fights his own mind almost on a minute-to-minute basis. Music becomes Nathaniel's only way to shut out the world, to gain a smidgen of privacy on the crowded, noisy streets. In his head, perhaps, he is still practicing for a distant concert date.
The film may be a little too slick and self-conscious for its skid row setting. Wright certainly loves his camera crane shots but they felt more appropriate in "Atonement" then here. And as a journalist, I can only wish that a newsroom were like a locker room with comic banter and live wires in every cubicle.
One thing is for certain: This will probably be the last movie ever to focus on a newspaper columnist. The filmmakers insist that the story takes place in a newsroom where laid-off employees are escorted by guards off the premises and bloggers are replacing guys like Lopez. You do have to wonder, though, if a blog about Ayers would have anywhere near the impact of Lopez's column. Doubt it.
Opens: April 24 (Paramount Pictures)
Posts: 5431 | Location: "Stay Classy San Diego!" | Registered: June 15, 2006
A short negative review from David Edelstein in NEW YORK MAGAZINE...
The Soloist also brings a new kind of celebrity to its real-life subject, a schizophrenic musician named Nathaniel Ayers, played onscreen by Jamie Foxx. Discovered living on the street by Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez (here, Robert Downey Jr.), Ayers has now seen his past (virtuosity, Juilliard, breakdown) and present (homelessness, shopping cart, Beethoven obsession) become the focus of a column and then a book and now a movie—although, as in most biopics of non-famous people, the where-they-are-now end titles leave out the most important bit: “Having been played by Jamie Foxx, Ayers is about to see his life transformed like you wouldn’t effing believe.” Foxx doesn’t sentimentalize Ayers. He lightens his eyebrows, turns his face into a mask, and remains on his own remote wavelength. He’s stunning—the only flaw is his old Ray Charles head-sway. The drama in Susannah Grant’s script is what happens when a middle-class white boy tries to save someone who won’t and can’t be saved: How responsible is he? The movie is a noble enterprise, and Downey is stupendous as usual, but Joe Wright’s direction is too slick to elicit much feeling (Ayers’s visions while listening to Beethoven recall the iTunes Visualizer), and the use of actual mentally ill homeless people unintentionally echoes the central conundrum: You’ve made these people movie stars. Now what? — David Edelstein Worth waiting for?
Scheduled to open during last year’s Oscar season, The Soloist was instead left on the shelf, accumulating bad buzz while the studio pushed Revolutionary Road as its Oscar contender. Jamie Foxx’s performance as homeless prodigy Nathaniel Ayers has gotten the worst feedback so far.
Posts: 27210 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Some of the lost souls in “The Soloist,” a big studio movie about a one-man rescue mission, look as thin as the crack pipes clamped between their lips. These are a few of the ghosts who haunt Los Angeles, that Mecca of Fabulousness where you can go for weeks (and invariably by car) without smelling the reek of other people’s desperation. That helps explain why Hollywood types tend not to set their camera sights on homeless men, women and children, unless they’re good for a little uplift (as in the Will Smith vehicle “The Pursuit of Happyness”). Homeless people are generally, pardon the pun, bummers —they also can’t afford tickets.
Based on a book by the Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, “The Soloist” recounts what happened when one of the city’s more privileged denizens (Robert Downey Jr. as the newsman) met one of its least fortunate (Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Anthony Ayers). A Juilliard dropout, Mr. Ayers ended up on the streets, where he pushed a shopping cart filled with trash and bedded down next to rats. This isn’t a milieu in which you might expect to find the British director Joe Wright, last seen exploring class and other catastrophes in “Atonement.” Yet he fits fine with “The Soloist,” perhaps because he brings an outsider’s perspective to the material or is just accustomed to navigating the divide between the haves and have-nots.
Polished to a high gleam by Mr. Wright and written by Susannah Grant (whose credits include “In Her Shoes”), the film is imperfect, periodically if unsurprisingly sentimental, overly tidy and often very moving. It works hard to make you feel good, as is to be expected, even as it maintains a strong sense of moral indignation that comes close to an assertion of real politics. Outrage would be too much for a mainstream entertainment like this one to manage. Like its muckraking journalist guide, it exploits its subjects for its own purposes. But its commitment to the material feels honest, nowhere more so than in Mr. Downey’s darkly shaded, nuanced performance, one that deepens this film with its insistence on the fundamental mysteries of human character.
It’s no surprise when Lopez, taking a break from the newsroom roar, stops to listen to a disheveled man playing a two-stringed violin. In journalistic fashion, wonderment morphs into curiosity and then dogged pursuit as he quickly grasps that he’s discovered the makings of a great story. Although Lopez cooks up a column soon after they meet, the full account of how Ayers went from a happy childhood in Cleveland to bright promise in New York and then to his Los Angeles hell emerges through seamlessly interspersed, economical flashbacks. Lightly tinted, as is often customary in movies that return to the past (it’s as if happy childhoods were bathed in honey), the flashbacks are pieces of a puzzle that Lopez becomes increasingly hesitant to solve.
It is, he discovers, difficult to deal with people in pain. Although they meet cute in the shadow of a looming statue of Beethoven (dedicated to the founder of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra), the journalist and his story don’t settle into predictability, largely because Ayers is intrinsically volatile. Given to verbose bursts and abrupt silences, he doesn’t so much talk to Lopez (he doesn’t always make eye contact either) as just talk and talk, the words pouring out like water until something (rage? fear? chemistry?) stops the flow. Mr. Foxx often seems uncomfortable in his role, wavering between pathos and something harder and truer, but his scatlike delivery of some of Ayers’s twisting ropes of words can be mesmerizing.
In Los Angeles homeless people are more likely to get sunburns than die freezing in the streets. Because of the city’s sprawl and dependence on automobiles, they also tend to be less visible than they are in more geographically compressed urban areas like Manhattan. In 2005, the year Mr. Lopez wrote his first column about Mr. Ayers, an estimated 8,000 to 11,000 were living in a 50-block skid row downtown, not far from the Los Angeles Times building, City Hall and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Frank Gehry-designed music center that sits on a hill like an enormous silvery flower far from the reach of the Nathaniel Ayerses of this world.
Over the course of “The Soloist,” Lopez helps Ayers reconnect with his music and, in tentative fashion, a more dignified way of living in the world. There are triumphs and setbacks, but these arrive fairly quietly, with none of the 101 weeping strings that often come with stories as emotionally fraught as this one (though Beethoven does shake the speakers). Helping someone off the streets is no small thing, but the story of one man is just that: the story of a single individual, a point that Mr. Wright underscores repeatedly. Again and again the film plunges into the streets, diving into a brackish humanity only to then drift amid the lost and forgotten. In the restrained voice-over that wends through the film, Lopez gives witness to what he has seen.
“The Soloist” wouldn’t work half as well without Mr. Downey’s astringent, bristly take on a man whose best intentions eventually collide with difficult truths. The actor is a wonder, but he has solid support from Catherine Keener as Lopez’s former wife and editor and Nelsan Ellis as a counselor working in the skid row trenches. Both characters exist mostly to push back at Lopez: they wag an occasional finger and dole out tough love and advice. Mr. Wright might be tempted to indulge in lofty symbolism (there are some unfortunately high-flying pigeons), but these three actors, along with the homeless people who worked as extras, help keep him tethered closer to the ground. It’s amazing what you can see when you get out of your car and walk: other people, for starters.
“The Soloist” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). There’s nothing here that a 13-year-old hasn’t heard.
Posts: 27210 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Downey and Foxx's Disciplined Performances Almost Save The Soloist By Ella Taylor Tuesday, April 21st 2009 at 3:06pm
An old-fashioned tale for a new-fangled world, Joe Wright's overwrought drama turns on a series of columns begun in 2005 by Los Angeles Times reporter Steve Lopez, an old-school vox populi whose writing about his friendship with Nathaniel Ayers, a musically gifted, schizophrenic homeless black man on the city's Skid Row, drew an outpouring of reader sympathy. Wright, who brought us the ghosts of upper-crust England past with Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, seems an odd choice to direct a movie set in the Other Los Angeles, and he vulgarizes Lopez's intelligent populism. Using local non-pro actors, he pumps up Lopez's laconically described Skid Row into a Ken Russell hellhole of social outcasts, a florid backdrop for Lopez's steep learning curve about the man he wants to save from himself. Screenwriter Susannah Grant has turned the happily married Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) into a barely socialized basketcase divorced from his wife and boss (Catherine Keener). Stalwartly resisting the overkill, Downey delivers his lines in a flat mumble that's astutely complemented by Jamie Foxx, whose beautifully modulated performance as Nathaniel catches the way people with psychotic illnesses slip in and out of rationality. Foxx and Downey's disciplined duet come close to redeeming The Soloist from its visual excesses, but Wright leaves us with a parting shot of the dancing homeless that shamelessly exploits the very people he means to champion.
Posts: 27210 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
"The Soloist" has all the elements of an uplifting drama, except for the uplift. The story is compelling, the actors are in place, but I was never sure what the filmmakers wanted me to feel about it. Based on a true story, it stars Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless man who was once a musical prodigy, and Robert Downey Jr. as Steve Lopez, the Los Angeles Times columnist who writes a column about him, bonds with him, makes him famous, becomes discouraged by the man's mental illness and -- what? Hears him play great music?
"Explaining madness is the most limiting and generally least convincing thing a movie can do," Pauline Kael once wrote. "The Soloist" doesn't even seem sure how to depict it. Unlike Russell Crowe's mathematician in "A Beautiful Mind," whose madness was understood through his own eyes, the musician here seems more of a loose cannon, unpredictable in random ways. Yes, mental illness can be like that, but can successful drama? There comes a point when Lopez has had enough, and so, in sympathy, have we.
That is no fault of Jamie Foxx's performance creating a man who is tense, fearful, paranoid and probably schizophrenic. We can almost smell his terror, through the carnival clown clothing and hats he hides behind. When Foxx learned of this role, he might reasonably have sensed another Academy Award. Unfortunately, the sceenwriter and director don't set up a structure for Oscar-style elevation, nor do they really want to make a serious and doleful film about mental illness. But those are the two apparent possibilities here, and "The Soloist" seems lost between them.
As the film opens, Lopez is troubled. His marriage has problems, he feels burned out at work, he's had a bike accident. He encounters Ayers almost outside the Times building, attracted by the beautiful sounds he's producing on a violin with only two strings. The man can play. Lopez tries to get to know him, writes a first column about him, learns he once studied cello at Juilliard. A reader sends Lopez a cello for him (this actually happened), and the columnist becomes his brother's keeper.
This is a thankless and possibly futile task. "The Soloist" does a very effective job of showing us a rehab center on Skid Row, and the reason so many homeless avoid such shelters. It's not what happens inside, but the gauntlet of street people necessary to run just to get to its doors. Indifference about adequate care for our homeless population was one of the priorities of the Selfish Generation.
As a mentally ill man, Ayers is unpredictable and explosive, yes, but almost as if responding to the arc of the screenplay. Characters have arcs in most movies, but the trick is to convince us we're watching them really behave. Here Foxx is let down, and the disappointment is greater because of the track records of director Joe Wright ("Atonement") and writer Susannah Grant ("Erin Brockovich"). We see a connection between the two men, but not communication.
As a newspaper columnist, Downey is plausible as his overworked, disillusioned character, finding redemption through a story. And Catherine Keener, like Helen Mirren in "State of Play," convinces me she might really be an editor. Both actresses bring a welcome change of pace from the standard Lou Grant type. Talk about disillusionment; the old-timers can't believe their eyes these days. The Los Angeles Times of this movie is at least still prospering.
As for the music, Beethoven of course is always uplifting, but the movie doesn't employ him as an emotional showstopper, as Debussy's "Clair de Lune" is used in "Tokyo Sonata." There's no clear idea of what it would mean should Ayers triumph in a public debut; would it be a life-changing moment or only an anomaly on his tragic road through life? Can he be salvaged? Does he want to be? Or will be always be a soloist, playing to his demons in the darkness under a bridge?
Posts: 27210 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A *** review from Peter Travers in ROLLING STONE...
"Based on a True Story." That phrase strikes fear in the hearts of most critics. For good reason. You might as well add the subhead: "True, as long as it doesn't get in the way of twisting facts, adding laughs and jerking tears in the name of BIG MOMENTS." That The Soloist is directed by the young, gifted and British Joe Wright (Atonement, Pride and Prejudice) to steer clear of the sentimental traps in the script by Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich) is reason enough to recommend it. That The Soloist features two of the year's best performances from Robert Downey, Jr. and Jamie Foxx raises the bar another notch. Downey plays Steve Lopez, a Los Angeles Times columnist who in 2005 began writing a series of articles about musician Nathaniel Ayers (Foxx). Once a Julliard cello prodigy, Ayers, suffering from severe schizophrenia, has literally hit the skids when Lopez meets him, playing a battered two-string violin in the slums of Los Angeles, remnants of clothes stuffed like rags in the cart he drags with him. Lopez published his articles in book called The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music. See what I mean about striking fear in the heart?
Well, don't be afraid, at least not that much. OK, the movie gets sidetracked with social activism as Ayers tries and fails to fit in with L.A.'s Lamp Community for the mentally challenged and Wright seeks cinematic equivalents for the voices in this musician's head. But as the movie progresses, it's clear that the miswiring of modern life is Wright's true subject. Downey nails it in small scene where he sits down on the steps of the shelter and listens to a homeless woman's random rant with the ears of a kindred spirit. Every time I feared an assault of bromides about the triumph of the human spirit, The Soloist dodged the bullet. Lopez may think at first that his attention will be the cure for Ayers, the inspiration to straighten up and fly right to Oprah. But the movie is having none of that. Foxx, his eyes darting, his head down, his anger on a low simmer, doesn't cheat in his portrait of Ayers' illness. Something inside of Ayers will always remain unreachable. Downey's eyes finally reflect that acceptance, capturing the film's grieving heart. Rarely have actors achieved such a bond playing characters who can never really connect. In the end, The Soloist isn't about BIG MOMENTS, it's about the grace notes, the kind that stay with you.
Posts: 27210 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
