‘The Soloist’: Doesn’t Hit All the Right Notes

Director: Joe Wright
Running Time: 117 Minutes
Rated: PG-13

For: Drama and acting enthusiasts; Jamie Foxx/Robert Downing Jr. fans
Not For: Those looking for the next Best Picture nominee

The Soloist looks as though it has a great movie written all over it.  It has two wonderful stars as the headliners.  The plot focuses on the redemption of one man and how another tries to get past his madness to show off his gift.  The moral itself is sound as well, focusing on the poverty within Los Angeles and the beauty within.  Two warning signs appear, however.  First, Dreamworks decided to push back the film from the Oscar Award period to right before the hectic summer movie season, making it almost impossible for it to gain any real traction among viewers.  Second, there are a lot of elements that the movie forces upon itself to get right.  Although The Soloist is a fairly good movie with a lot to say to the audience about music, passion, and poverty, it falls under its own weight of trying to touch upon too many themes and not enough answers, making its final emotional moments fall flat.

The film follows Steve Lopez (Robert Downing Jr.), a long-time Los Angeles Times journalist who has a popular column filled with weird articles about people and activities around Los Angeles.  Unfortunately, his life is not exactly enviable, being divorced, injured in a bike accident, and at the bottom of the barrels in terms of stories to write.  One day, he hears someone playing beautiful cello music on the streets and meets Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a homeless and schizophrenic young man.  After Lopez write about him, the two start to form a bond as they continually meet.  However, Lopez may have bagged more than he bargained for as he explores Ayers’ world of homelessness and depression.

The film soars when focused on its actors and various themes.  Robert Downing Jr. and Jamie Foxx are great to watch as they interact in their very different roles.  Downing brings a suave yet dejected Lopez to life as he discovers a passion that was lacking in his life while repairing the relationships around him.  Foxx takes on a very different challenge of attempting to portray a schizophrenic genius musician and for the amount of time he is given, he does a great job of giving the audience the confusion that takes place in Ayers’ mind.  Their relationship really holds the film together and creates a very intriguing plot thread of an unexpected friendship, the way they use each other, and the way they learn from one another.  Additionally, Wright tackles a lot of ideas with very interesting interpretations.  The most ambitious of these ideas is how each person sees music.  For instance, Lopez’s view on listening to music is seen through the sights of Los Angeles while Ayers’ is shown through vibrant colors.  These types of interesting ideas pulls through a fairly ambitious agenda in showing the audience what these people see and what the audience themselves may interpret when listening to some type of music.  All of this is complemented by a sweeping and beautiful cinematography, which gives off some thoughtful and smart imagery.  The camera soars over Los Angeles, following birds that represents Lopez’s thoughts while panning up majestically at the Los Angeles Disney Concert Hall as the duo run up its ramp or hauntingly glides across the dumpsters the homeless sleep in on Skid Row.

Yet these ideas are never cohesively fused into a successful narrative or never taken in a completely ambitious direction.  One instance is with poverty.  The film tries to uphold a moral stance against combating poverty, yet all it really shows is the suffering instead of any practical solution or consequence.  This holds true for most of the film’s other ideas as well whether it is from the theme of redemption, which becomes undercooked as none of the characters come full circle with themselves, or even the plot, which feels highly inconclusive in both a complete narrative arc or a tangible conclusion.  It is a bit understandable since the characters are still alive and that the film takes place only a few years prior to the present day, yet the film does little to create some kind of perspective or answer to what all the characters went through.  The process of understanding is missing from the grand visuals.  Plot holes are also everywhere as key flashbacks are missing (what happened between Ayers’ college and present day years) and the ending sequence especially seems so unrealistic in light of the rest of the film.  Probably the oddest offense is the music, which takes the simple route in using classical music pieces yet never delves farther to match the visual imagery.  It becomes a disappointing revelation as the film goes on.

The Soloist is a valiant effort at representing the ideals of two men and the poverty in Los Angeles but never truly emotionally finishes its ideas.  That really is neither the fault of its actors, in which both Foxx and Downing both give terrific and intriguing performances, nor the imagery, which shows off beautiful cinematography of Los Angeles to various visual interpretations of music.  Even the general plot structure is made to give off a huge emotional attachment, yet there is never a sense of fulfillment or completeness as the narrative lacks context and concrete reasoning.  Simply showing off visuals and numbers of poverty makes the film feel more preachy than heartbreaking and even the music feels underdeveloped and obtuse.  Better editing and narrative placement could have created a much more sound movie.  Instead, The Soloist ends up as a good effort that will be remembered more for its flaws than its achievements.

The Wie muses: *** out of *****

Ratings:
*****: Excellent
**** to ****½: Great
*** to ***½: Good
** to **½: Mediocre
* to *½: Bad
0 to ½: Terrible

The Soloist Trailer

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