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The Soloist Review
21 Sep 2009
Critics rating: 3 stars out of 5
Reviewed by Tom Charity , LOVEFiLM
The Soloist

Here's a handy alternative to Fame - the flipside of all those idol dreams.

Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) is a prodigious talent – or was… a Julliard student once upon a time. So he tells LA Times columnist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr), though it’s a little hard to believe, seeing as how Nathaniel is about as down and out as you can get, a one-man circus who pulls a shopping trolley around town, conversing with Ludwig Van and practicing his art on the two strings left on his fiddle.

The Soloist

Starring Jamie Foxx, Robert Downey Jr., Catherine Keener, Tom Hollander
Director Joe Wright
Genres Drama
Run time 109 mins Certificate 12

Cast details

Lopez writes it up: A prodigious musical talent grows up in the ghetto, earns a scholarship to Julliard to play the cello, succumbs to schizophrenia, flunks out and winds up – 20 years later – playing for the birds. (‘The pigeons clap when they fly,’ Nathaniel explains.)

Readers are moved. Someone sends a cello to the paper, and in delivering it, Lopez becomes embroiled in Nathaniel’s life. This gift has strings attached, in more ways than one. He wants Nathaniel to move to a community shelter. He wants him to take meds, too resume his lessons… He wants to fix him.
 

Hollywood tends to do this stuff too easily; equating mental illness with artistic or spiritual transcendence and most often trivializing both in the process. Written by Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich) and directed by our own Joe Wright (Atonement), The Soloist isn’t immune to these bland temptations, but it’s smart enough to locate the cliché in the reporter’s own need for healing.

Lopez accepts the role of fairy godfather with some reluctance (and alarm, when Nathaniel takes to calling his savior his ‘God’), but we see that his own house is scarcely a home. His wife (Catherine Keener – also his editor) has gone. The kids are gone. Paintings are stacked against the walls. His belongings are in boxes – not so different from the junk in Nathaniel’s cart. Perhaps Lopez is The Soloist here?

At any rate, Downey plays him like a virtuoso. In the normal way of things this film should belong to Nathaniel/Jamie Foxx. He’s making beautiful music; wears a star-spangled wardrobe and flips between states of semi-autistic reiteration, periods of calm and fury.

The Soloist: Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx

Somehow, though, Foxx slips into a supporting role. That’s not necessarily the actor’s fault or even to the detriment of the movie, though flashbacks to his youth are relatively one-note. Joe Wright makes every effort to put us into Nathaniel’s head, but these expressionist flourishes are only sporadically effective. Whichever way the screenplay may have been weighted, I suspect Wright saw what he had in Downey and let him carry it.

He’s been sucking up the accolades for a long time now, and rightfully so, but until Iron Man most of Downey’s best work has been restricted to supporting roles (I’d pick out One Night Stand, Zodiac, Wonder Boys and A Scanner Darkly). This time he assumes centre stage through sheer focus. He’s unerringly truthful, never showy, not the cynical snark he could easily caricature. Under Downey’s influence The Soloist becomes a movie about a concerned middle-aged white man learning what commitment means.

There are other good things: Wright, who also made Pride and Prejudice is a gifted – if self-conscious – stylist, and he seizes on downtown LA as if nobody had filmed there before. More importantly, it’s a film you find yourself listening to intently. He holds back the music for long stretches, and makes it count (in one ostentatious sequence set in the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Beethoven’s Third is rendered in a fantasia of abstract chroma).

 

Wright, who also made Pride and Prejudice is a gifted - if self-conscious - stylist, and he seizes on downtown LA as if nobody had filmed there before.

Best of all, maybe, are the faces of the homeless Wright shares with us. Old faces. Odd, asymmetrical, sometimes bewildered faces… Faces the like of which we don’t see on movie screens too often, but vivid and painfully real in a way that – for whatever reason – eludes the heroic efforts of Jamie Foxx.

Wright lays everything on a bit thick, perhaps, even his restraint – but at least this movie acknowledges the gaping class and race divide so real in America and so invisible in Hollywood movies. It’s worth seeing for Downey at something near his peak, and hearing for Beethoven too.
 

The Soloist Reviews

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