The Soloist

(2009)

Directed by

Joe Wright

Review by Terry Plucknett

Steve Lopez is a down-on-his-luck columnist for The Los Angeles Times looking for a story.  Nathaniel Anthony Ayers Jr. is a down-on-his-luck musical savant that has a story to be told.  Joe Wright’s third feature film starring Robert Downey, Jr. as Lopez and Jamie Foxx as Ayers lacks the sure scope and scale of his first two films, but although this film is made on a smaller scale, it is still a solid film with many strong points.

Ayers was a Juilliard student as a cellist when he had a mental breakdown that left him on the streets with a shopping cart of possessions and his only musical outlet being a violin with only two strings.  Because of his homelessness, his mental instability has gone untreated for years.  This is the situation Lopez stumbles into when he finds Ayers playing his music under a statue of his favorite composer, Beethoven.  Lopez decides to break his writer’s block by writing a piece on how a former Juilliard student can end up on the streets like Ayers.  Making the world aware of Ayers’s situation, opportunities begin to present themselves to improve his lifestyle including an apartment to stay in a homeless shelter, special access to symphony rehearsals, and a brand new cello at his disposal.  Throughout the story, Lopez is inspired by Ayers’s deep love for music to actually fight for something he believes in: the well-being of his one true friend. 

Many plot points in the storyline are a little cliché, but you can’t argue much with that since it is a true story.  What I had a problem with was not the storyline but some of the storytelling.  There are several flashbacks thrown in to show how Ayers developed his love of music and also how his mental breakdown came about.  The Lopez side story has to do with his ex-wife (Catherine Keener), who is also a co-worker at the Times, and their fragile relationship which helps the viewer see where Lopez’s life and attitude were before he met Ayers.  The flashbacks and the ex-wife turn out to be nothing more than a distraction from the primary story, which is the strength of this movie.  The movie would have been just as good, if not better, without these two distractions being present.

The reason the main story is the strength of the movie is simply because Robert Downey, Jr. and Jamie Foxx are absolutely brilliant.  The interaction between their two characters was electric and left me wanting more.  Every now and then movie stars show exactly why they are movie stars: they are really good at what they do.  This is what Downey and Foxx do here.

The other strength of this film is the direction of Joe Wright.  As I said before, this is Wright’s third full-length feature after Pride and Prejudice and Atonement and although The Soloist is nowhere near the movie that his first two films were, it isn’t trying to be.  It is a simple story with simple people, yet Joe Wright finds a way to make it beautiful.  Several times throughout the movie you can just tell that a brilliant director is behind the camera.

Although the story has some issues and problems, the performances by the two lead actors, as well as Joe Wright’s direction, make this movie worth seeing.

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