Running time: 109 minutes
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Jamie Foxx, Catherine Keener, Tom Hollander
Rating 5 out of 10
There are 90,000 homeless people in Los Angeles. Each of them has a story to tell. The Soloist is one. Based on true events, it's about Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a gifted musician who studied at Jullliard, America's most prestigious music school, and went from a promising future as a concert cellist to trundling around downtown Los Angeles, his worldly possession in a shopping trolley, playing a two-stringed violin to an audience of pigeons.
It's an extraordinary story, one that was chronicled by Steve Lopez in his weekly column for the Los Angeles Times, and subsequently turned into a book. The Soloist focuses on Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) and his relationship with Ayers and how their friendship impacts each other. With such a compelling subject, The Soloist should be absorbing, but in the hands of director Joe Wright (Atonement), it gets mired in overblown romanticism. Susannah Grant's script wanders off on aimless tangents while a forced sense of drama elevates events above any plausible sense of realism. In Hollywood it's not simply enough to tell the truth, even when the truth is more remarkable than anything a writer could conjure up.
How anyone ends up living rough on the streets is invariably a result of misfortune. It's something that could easily befall any of us, which is what makes us uncomfortable in their presence. They come from every walk of life. A vast number are there because of medical reasons, cast aside from a society that doesn't care, which is disturbing in one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Nathaniel Ayers began suffering from schizophrenia while at Juilliard, but even though he lacked the ability to cope with life, his musical gift was never impaired. It is what sustains him.
After first encountering Ayers, Lopez begins featuring him in his Points West column. One immediate result is a generous reader donates a cello to Ayers who has been reduced to playing his beloved Beethoven on a violin that has just two strings. Lopez's motives are at times conflicted. On the one hand he wants to fix Ayers, get him medication, a home and perhaps even revive his career, while at the same time he exploits his story for professional gain. Ayers, on the other hand, is simply grateful to have a friend. Foxx did a great job in his portrayal of another disabled musician, Ray Charles, but he is definitely not known for his subtlety and his depiction of Ayers, with his eccentric dress sense, is as loud as Ayers' playing is quiet. Teamed with the equally extravagant Downey, who imbues Lopez with a frenetic, nervous energy, the mix is one that sees both actors dueling for attention.
Trying to understand what goes through the mind of a schizophrenic is a topic best left for a film with more substance than this, so the sequences of psychedelic imagery used to suggest how music affects Ayers appear trite and misplaced. It's yet one of many examples where The Soloist's embellishments detract from the story rather than enhance it.
Kevin Murphy
It's an extraordinary story, one that was chronicled by Steve Lopez in his weekly column for the Los Angeles Times, and subsequently turned into a book. The Soloist focuses on Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) and his relationship with Ayers and how their friendship impacts each other. With such a compelling subject, The Soloist should be absorbing, but in the hands of director Joe Wright (Atonement), it gets mired in overblown romanticism. Susannah Grant's script wanders off on aimless tangents while a forced sense of drama elevates events above any plausible sense of realism. In Hollywood it's not simply enough to tell the truth, even when the truth is more remarkable than anything a writer could conjure up.
How anyone ends up living rough on the streets is invariably a result of misfortune. It's something that could easily befall any of us, which is what makes us uncomfortable in their presence. They come from every walk of life. A vast number are there because of medical reasons, cast aside from a society that doesn't care, which is disturbing in one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Nathaniel Ayers began suffering from schizophrenia while at Juilliard, but even though he lacked the ability to cope with life, his musical gift was never impaired. It is what sustains him.
After first encountering Ayers, Lopez begins featuring him in his Points West column. One immediate result is a generous reader donates a cello to Ayers who has been reduced to playing his beloved Beethoven on a violin that has just two strings. Lopez's motives are at times conflicted. On the one hand he wants to fix Ayers, get him medication, a home and perhaps even revive his career, while at the same time he exploits his story for professional gain. Ayers, on the other hand, is simply grateful to have a friend. Foxx did a great job in his portrayal of another disabled musician, Ray Charles, but he is definitely not known for his subtlety and his depiction of Ayers, with his eccentric dress sense, is as loud as Ayers' playing is quiet. Teamed with the equally extravagant Downey, who imbues Lopez with a frenetic, nervous energy, the mix is one that sees both actors dueling for attention.
Trying to understand what goes through the mind of a schizophrenic is a topic best left for a film with more substance than this, so the sequences of psychedelic imagery used to suggest how music affects Ayers appear trite and misplaced. It's yet one of many examples where The Soloist's embellishments detract from the story rather than enhance it.
Kevin Murphy
