The Soloist Stands on the Talent of a Pair of Great Performances
The overwhelming problem with The Soloist is that it the odds become ultimately unfairly stacked in its favor by having possibly one of the greatest current living actors Robert Downey, Jr. If there’s living proof that hardcore substance abuse is generally a positive if you and your loved ones can survive it, if you have any loved ones left after it’s over.
Package currently clean addict, Downey together with Jamie Foxx who proves that in the historical assessment of portraying the mentally ill, he can run circles around Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Rain Man there’s not much left about this film that’s not a foregone conclusion. It’s quite good.
The real story told in The Solist, apart from the slow death of the newspaper industry is about what constitutes acts of kindness, charity, friendship or perhaps simple good deeds.
Downey plays LA Time columnist Steven Lopez, who (in the real world) befriended hopeless schizophrenic cello player Nathanial Ayers in 2005 while hunting for fodder for his feature columns. Apart from a passing familiarity with the true story for which the film is based, I’m not sure how accurate a depiction of the events the film is, and it doesn’t really matter.
While Lopez is simply looking for a story that will move jaded and thinning herds of newspaper readers into attention spans greater than goats, he manages to stumble upon a musical prodigy. While Ayers’ inherent talent is what initially intrigues Lopez, he begins piecing together the disjointed story of how someone like this goes from a promising Julliard string player into the world of living out of a shopping cart in LA stringing together only passing moments of lucidity hardly able to maintain touch with reality.
While Ayers’ story is told in chunks of flashbacks throughout the film, it’s really the story of how Lopez uses Ayers as a surrogate outlet for what specks of humanity that he never managed to piece together enough of to hold his marriage and his relationship with his son together. In the process of trying to help Ayers use his talent to pull him out of the hell of the LA mentally ill homeless masses, he’s continuously frustrated by his inability to affect any meaningful of or lasting change in Ayers’ status. This soon dissolves into an ethical debate of what lengths or actions it’s proper for him to go even under the guise of helping him.
Make no mistake about The Soloist, there’s really not much new ground broken from a cinema standpoint here. There’s little uniquely original about it as the film speeds towards it’s inevitable tear-jerking finale as one of the feel-good movies of the summer other than a couple of astoundingly good performances from the two leads. But even the most oft-told stories are fascinating in the hands of professionals. Downey’s ability to craft a character certainly dwarfs the real Nathanial Ayers’ ability to craft a concerto on an old, beat-up set of strings and he takes Lopez’s interesting and fairly self-deprecating account of the events that unfolded and makes them a fantastic center for the character drama.
The greatness of Foxx’s performance is his complete detachment from the character’s seemingly ability to grow during the course of the experiences that his involvement with Lopez afforded him. There’s of course a tragic element to Ayers story as his entire youth is spent working to pull himself out of a modestly poor and unpromising life only to have mental illness drag him back to the harshest and most hopeless depths of the streets of Los Angeles.
Most importantly about the film, is that in spite of a satisfactory emotional resolution, the film doesn’t really sugar coat reality and while we don’t hit the end credits entirely where we’d hoped, it all felt right.
It would be very difficult to not give The Soloist a hearty recommendation and while it’s certainly going to take it’s knocks in the midst of a huge big-budget summer blockbuster season, it will certainly get it’s due later in the year and come academy awards time. It’s certainly worth slipping in amidst a little Wolverine and Star Trek before our brains get exploded at the box office the next couple of months.
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Tags: Movie Reviews
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2 Responses to “The Soloist Stands on the Talent of a Pair of Great Performances”
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April 27th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
[...] The Soloist Stands on the Talent of a Pair of Great Performances … [...]
April 29th, 2009 at 7:16 am
A film I’m really interested in seeing and I’m going to defintely check it out now. I’m not much for the theatre so hopefully I can remmeber when it’s released on DVD or just stream it. But Downey and Fox sound like a winning pair.