Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
4/26/09
Life, as we all know, is
hard, filled with problems that frustrate us by seeming unsolvable.
Nowhere is this more true than for those trying to help the mentally ill.
For generations, forced “treatment” only made things worse, and while new
drugs have helped more people than ever before, convincing those whose
problem is that they see the world through a distorted lens to act in their
own self interest is difficult at best. This problem goes hand-in-glove
with our homelessness crisis, as so many of the hundreds of thousands of
people living on the street in our country are mentally ill. Joe
Wright's The Soloist is a challenging look at both of these problems
through the eyes of Steve Lopez, a real-life LA Times reporter who chronicled
his friendship with homeless, schizophrenic musician Nathaniel Ayers Jr.
in a series of 2005 columns. The movie's a little on the long side
and suffers as a viewing experience because it's ABOUT frustration, but
the lead performances are flawless and Wright delivers one of the rawest
portraits of the homeless experience I've seen.
LA Times columnist Steve
Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) is returning to work amidst an outpouring of
support for a column he wrote about a recent bicycle accident. As
such, his editor and ex-wife Mary Weston (Catherine Keener) is looking
for more human interest stories from him. He finds one in a street
musician named Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) he finds playing a two-string
violin by a statue of Beethoven. Research supports Nathaniel's story
that he once attended Juliard, but he did not graduate and thirty rough
years have found him living on the street, ravaged by schizophrenia.
Lopez's column is well-received, and one reader donates a cello, Nathaniel's
original instrument. Steve tracks him down with a plan: the
cello will be kept at Lamp, a community center devoted to transitioning
the mentally ill off the streets, and he can play it there whenever he
wants. Nathaniel resists: Lamp can be a scary, filthy place,
and the gifted musician is both scared and obsessed with cleanliness to
start
with. But he does show up, and little by little becomes more attached
to the people there and his “God” Steve. It's a great arrangement
for the columnist as well: the articles bring him increased fame
and public influence that make Mary question the line between his altruism
and self-interest. But whether for his story or himself, Steve wants
to “fix” Nathaniel, and his escalating frustration with the slow pace of
his recovery will push him to take risks that could destroy their friendship.
Robert Downey Jr. delivered
the immortal “full retard” speech in Tropic
Thunder that gave a name to a certain kind of award-baiting hammery
wherein actors go for sentiment rather than reality in playing anyone with
a challenging mental state. Luckily, in his follow-up project, Jamie
Foxx goes totally the opposite way as Ayers, crafting a bold performance
that both allows us to see the warmth and talent that drew Steve Lopez
to the musician and to show the uncomfortable and downright scary aspects
of his illness. Foxx never tries to make Nathaniel huggable, instead
keeping us off-balance with the contradictions of his introverted muttering,
sincere friendliness and potential for explosive rage. The point
of The Soloist is that it's hard, long-haul work trying to pull
someone off the ledge of their own mental illness, and the movie wouldn't
work if you could ever look at the frustrated Lopez and say “Aw, come on,
suck it up! He's just got a couple quirks!”
And Downey Jr. is the perfect
actor for the other role, because the movie also wouldn't work if Lopez
came off as a patient Saint just trying to do the right thing. Even
when he's at his most altruistic in the movies, there's something about
RDJ that suggests that he's always got one eye on something else, plotting
the angles. And that allows us to ponder where the fact that Nathaniel
needs help ends and the fact that he's a great story begins. And
even within the confines of his need for help, how far will Steve go before
he decides it's just not worth it?
The Soloist doesn't
flinch from the hard realities of the world of Lamp (where parts of the
film were shot, using real-life residents who in fact are friends of the
real Nathaniel Ayers Jr.). As in Atonement,
Joe Wright excels at depicting in harsh terms things other directors would
visually sentimentalize, as he shakes us up with long, fluid shots of hundreds
of people packed into small areas, sleeping under dangerous and unsanitary
conditions. Flashbacks show how Nathaniel's early promise and big
shot at Juliard got away from him, and the movie uses voices on the soundtrack,
light show visuals and Foxx's powerful performance to take us convincingly
into his frightening inner world. The cast is rounded out with strong,
lived-in performances by the likes of Keener and Tom Hollander as a musician
Steve recruits to give Nathaniel lessons that don't work out as well as
planned. And the Lamp residents provide authenticity you could never
get from actors. But this is mostly a two-man show, carried by the
strength of the stars.
After you see the movie,
I highly recommend the original Lopez columns
( http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez-skidrow-nathaniel-series,0,1456093.special
), which paint a more complex picture of a group of supportive people writer
Susannah Grant has mostly folded into the writer himself. At times,
they made me question some of the filmmakers' choices. Does the story
really benefit from making Steve's marriage broken, unlike his successful
real-life one? And why change real-life cello instructor Peter Snyder,
who has also forged a positive friendship with Ayers, into the well-meaning
but tone-deaf religious right stereotype Graham Claydon? Some of
the movie's narrative claustrophobia would have actually cleared had it
stuck closer to the real-life way Steve's hard work helps to draw others
to Nathaniel's side.
As we prepare to turn the
corner into the Summer Movie Season and its' gloriously split-second rescues
and easy answers, it's a bit jarring to see a movie that tells you that
sometimes all you can do is fight the good fight and hope for slow, incremental
progress. But don't shoot the messenger: The Soloist
is a quality drama that delivers its' hard lessons with honesty and spunk.
And it wouldn't hurt to fire up your brain about The Big Issues one last
time before switching it off for a few months. |
