The Soloist

One of the biggest surprises I encountered upon returning from Europe was to find that The Soloist was still playing in the discount cinemas. I was sure it would be gone by now. But then, Gran Torino was still playing there too, so I shouldn't be too surprised.

Nevertheless, after having sat through trailers for this movie for almost a year (because they kept moving the release date back), I had written off the possibility of seeing this in the theater. Being able to do so felt like a little victory.

Moreover, it was showing at the West Boylston Cinema, which is a located in an inconspicuous strip mall next to a Wal-Mart north of Worcester. It's the kind of no-nonsense, bare bones cinema that I love, because it shows how little you really need for the movie experience, and also it proves how vibrant cinema still is in this country, if these kind of places keep plugging along in the days of opulent multiplexes.

Robert Downey Jr.---well who isn't a fan, really? He's on the short list of the best actors of his generation. He's the kind of actor that makes anything good (although I really have my doubts about Guy Ritchie's upcoming Sherlock Holmes)

I had seen the trailer to this movie so many times that I practically had it memorized, and thus I knew what to expect for most of the plot. Downey is Steve Lopez, a columnist for the L.A. Times who has a bicycle accident, and while recuperating, meets a schizophrenic street musician Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) who turns out to be a dropout of Julliard. After Lopez writes a column about Ayers, the public sort of falls in love with Ayers, and one reader even donates a cello for him.

I liked the classical structure at the beginning of the movie. Lopez is in a low point of his life. The script and the direction help augment this theme of "going under" in the Nietschean sense of the word. At the moment right before he meets Ayers, there is even a voice over from a random tour guide saying that this the "Lower Plaza" from the Spanish colonial days of L.A. This kind of thing really makes me admire the screenwriter.

Much of the movie is about how Lopez tries to rehabilitate Ayers. We learn how hard it is, and that there really isn't a lot that Ayers can do. It felt more than a little workmanlike, in an emotional sense, with very few surprises. The fairly routine tone of the main plot was thankfully broken up by a series of flashbacks to the earlier life of Ayers, when he was a young man in Cleveland, and when he went to New York City. Had it not been for this backstory, I think the movie would have been much harder to watch.

There were a few other thematic surprises, although they sort of felt tacked on in a clumsy way. One was about the ongoing downsizing of the L.A. Times, and about the newspaper business in general. It was interesting, although I'm not quite sure how it was supposed to support the main story, other than to buttress the general tone of hardship.

The most interesting angle was about current hoemlessness in Los Angeles, a subject that is all but ignored by Hollywood right now, even though it has exploded in the last couple years. It was nice to see this treated in a rather straightforward and updated way.

But the part that seemed the least interesting was the thematic recurrence of the idea of belief. Somehow this was supposed to be a commentary on the nature of belief, in oneself, in art, and ultimately in God. But it felt very confused. The worst part of the movie by far was an extremely hamfisted criticism of contemporary Christianity. I winced during the scenes involving this. It's not that honest criticism of religion isn't appropriate or interesting, but not this way. It felt like a parody of what Christians think that (Jewish-dominated) Hollywood thinks of them.

Downey was his usual extraordinary self. A lesser actor would rendered this movie impossible. Catherine Keener showed up as her usual "give the man a hard time" mature female character. That she is both Lopez's ex-wife and his boss at the newspaper seemed like a perfect framing for how Hollywood sees the power relationships in contemporary marriages.

But Jamie Foxx. Well, I did finally buy his character toward the end of the movie, but their were plenty of cringe moments. Granted, it was a hard role, but I couldn't help wondering if Downey told him "don't go the full retard" on this one.

The biggest cringe was when they showed Foxx as Ayers supposedly at Julliard playing his cello in a symphony. As the camera panned across the musicians, it was clear that all of them really could play their instruments---except for the guy sticking out like a sore thumb who had no place being there, but who was supposed to be a musical prodigy. Maybe a little more of the Method here?

But musician roles are notoriously hard in movies, so I can forgive. It's the old Golden Boy syndrome (he's a champion boxer and a violin virtuoso!). An actor always has to be a great musician and be something else in the movie at the same time, in this case a schizophrenic. That Foxx felt short is not indicative of an inferior acting ability, but rather a director who didn't see the shots that shouldn't have been included.