terribly underrated

Rating: 8/10 (21 February 2013)

Two terrific performances by Downey and Foxx in this based-on-real-life look at the relationship between an LA reporter and a schizophrenic homeless musician. Watching the interviews with the real people the film portrays, I was even more impressed with how the screenwriter and actors had caught the dynamic between the two, the speech patterns of Ayers, and the inner world of the schizophrenic. I loved what Ayers sees, with closed eyes, during the performance of the Eroica, an abstract synaesthetic wonder.
This film could have been made specifically for me. I love Beethoven, for one thing-- so the score is a pure delight. I've usually had pleasant interactions with street people. I like schizophrenics. I never assume when such a person says to me that they can see/hear something I cannot that I am right and they are wrong; I often suspect they are seeing something I'm too limited to see and just having a hard time putting it into words I can understand. And the ones I've connected with are smart and interesting and insightful; they're a delight to listen to. There's nothing here of the errors of Beautiful Mind, no simplistic pro-pharma,drug-the-genius-out-of-them worldview. And yet the schizophrenia is not innocuous here; it is sometimes a danger to Ayers and others. This is real mental illness, not Hollywood mental illness.
I suspect that is why the film has a low rating. Filmviewers--American in particular--want a clear simplistic story that matches the false narrative they get on commercial TV, the simple metanarratives they hear on talk shows (sponsored by big pharma, in part, but people aren't very good about applying critical consciousness to facts like that). They likely don't want their limited worldviews shaken.
This is happy story, though it doesn't provide a Capraesque treacly ending. The uplift here is that one human being actually *saw* another human being and accepted him for what he is. This is a rare enough event in human interaction it qualifies as "weird news." As novelist Irish Murdoch said, "Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real." This film is a moving portrait of real human love, not a love that seeks to change the other, but that accepts the beloved.
That this is rated lower here (and even by many critics) than typically awful horror films or comic book-based movies is a tragedy, yet is unsurprising. Perhaps the film is rated low because it subtly tells you, you can make the world a better place by behaving like Lopez, but it isn't easy, and the work never ends. You have to work on yourself too. The film challenges you. It doesn't say there are clear bad guys; it doesn't say the mentally ill and homeless are "them" and we're safe over here on our side in our difference. It says, everybody is a person, equal in his worth. It's a revolutionary message.