“The Soloist,” is an emotionally soaring drama about the redemptive power of music, journalist Steve Lopez (Oscar® nominee Robert Downey Jr.) discovers Nathaniel Anthony Ayers (Oscar® winner Jamie Foxx), a former classical music prodigy, playing his violin on the streets of L.A. As Lopez endeavors to help the homeless man find his way back, a unique friendship is formed, one that transforms both their lives. “The Soloist” is directed by Joe Wright (Golden Globe winner for Best Drama and Oscar® nominee for Best Picture “Atonement”).
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"Robert Downey Jr. is always watchable and entertaining"
Surely it’s a little bit earlier in the year for this kind of film? The melodramatic Oscar-bait usually comes out at the end of the year for maximum tear-jerking, statuette-grabbing appeal. Based on a true story, The Soloist follows a journalist for the LA Times, Steve Lopez (Downey Jr.) as he befriends a schizophrenic homeless violin player (Foxx) that he discovers is an alumnus of Julliard music school.
Steve is initially drawn to him because of the outlandishness of his appearance and his apparent talent but soon develops a friendship with him. He decides to try to rehabilitate him, making contact with a community centre and securing him tuition with the principal cellist of the LA philharmonic (a hilariously placed Tom Hollander). But as he delves deeper into his past and begins to get Nathaniel to open up about his background, he finds that his mental problems extend further than he initially thought.
Robert Downey Jr. is always watchable and entertaining no matter what he’s in and gives Lopez a dry wit which is often funny and charming. It’s a shame then, that his performance is the one shining pearl lost in a sea of over-directed schmaltz. Jamie Foxx, clearly going for another “genius-with-problems-overcomes-adversity” Oscar badly misrepresents Nathaniel, realistically portraying his mental problems, but giving us no sense of the character behind those problems.
On top of this, director Joe Wright gets caught up in trying to visually represent Nathaniel’s music – an eye-rolling sequence in which the camera sweeps through an aqueduct disturbing a flock of birds is terribly misplaced and ham-fisted. I’d like to know if the article extracts read as voice-overs in the film are actually Lopez’s real words because they’re frightfully trite and over-sentimental and seem hardly the oeuvre of an award-winning journalist.
The film does resist the temptation to end on too sentimental a note and it should be praised for that but by this time, you’ve been bludgeoned so hard into submission by the endless stream of clichéd mawkishness that it makes no difference. Downey Jr. makes the film bearable but it’s an over-long, hackneyed chore of a film. Now watch the Academy fall over itself to hand it awards.
