Contrived

Rating: 5/10 (24 April 2009)

"The Soloist" proves once again that it's never a good sign when a movie suddenly gets pulled from the Oscar schedule. At the time Paramount said it had something to do with some new scheduling campaign. The truth comes out this weekend though and the final verdict is that it doesn't bode well for the Oscar chances of its two very talented leads or the movie itself this year either. The movie is based on a book by Steve Lopez about schizophrenic cellist Nathaniel Ayers Jr. I haven't read the book or watched any of the various news stories about the relationship between the two because I was hoping that the movie would capture whatever incredible true story happened here and I wanted to be surprised. Just unfortunately the screenplay by Susannah Grant (a talented dramatic writer responsible for "Erin Brockovich" and "In her Shoes") feels less like "Shine" and more like blah.
Robert Downey Jr. plays Steve Lopez, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times who while eating lunch notices a homeless man with nothing but a shopping cart full of crap and a violin with only two strings. He's playing it right in front of a statue of his hero, Beethoven. The man is Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), who began as a young cello player. As a young boy his life became all about music, shutting out the world around him for the sweet sounds of Beethoven and his own dreams of becoming his equal. He attended Julliard School with hopes of becoming the best but instead he suffered a mental breakdown that sent him falling from grace and into playing music under bridges and on street corners. Lopez finds the story fascinating and writes a human-interest piece about him and soon he's trying to help Nathaniel get back on a right track again. But does Nathaniel even want to do that? Grant's screenplay likes to pat itself on the back for showing that a friendship such as this can exist. It's all very formulaic and slightly questionable. Is Lopez staying with Nathaniel out of care or because it would make for good continuing articles if Nathaniel becomes a success? Lopez, who's developed only up to the point of being an accident-prone divorcée, managed some notoriety out of this so it does smack of exploitation but I also have to imagine that the book and various stories on this subject did have more context to it, especially when it comes to the Los Angeles homeless, mental illness, and the subject of Ayer's redemption. The movie's best scenes show the despair of the Lamp Homeless shelter, the drug use and mental illness that plague society's cast-offs. These scenes are good because the people seem real, but once it switches back to Lopez and Ayers, its all phony uplift that doesn't really say much. It's crap, but it tries to trick you with beauty. During musical interludes, director Joe Wright follows seagulls as they soar through the air with the music and in the most blinding moment of the year so far, he stages a light show that's supposed to represent how Nathaniel sees the music in his head.
Both actors do their best. Foxx is very good here, finding the humanity that the screenplay doesn't. He's a hurried, agitated rambler, a man with a natural love for music, and a tragic genius cut down by his own brain. He brings both a free spirit and pained sense of claustrophobic entrapment by his illness, and one thing he and Joe Wright do very well is displaying schizophrenia as a haunting illness if nothing else. Downey has less to do but he manages to be as cynical and funny as always. Catherine Keener is also in this movie, playing Lopez's ex-wife, but she's very much underused.
"The Soloist" is the second movie in two weeks, after "State of Play", to also bring up the fact that young people don't seem to be reading newspapers anymore. Human interest stories like this one are pretty solid ways to generate interest though and I'm sure at the time the articles were being written there was way more to the story of Steve and Nathaniel than this very Hollywood-ized treatment would have you believe.