'The Soloist' Plays Some Creative Notes

by Brett Parker

The Soloist is a film that lingers beautifully on small details but seems reluctant to dive head-first into the bigger picture at hand. In telling the story of a mentally disturbed man and the reporter who tries to help him, director Joe Wright pays a great attention to the details of his characters’ environment but not enough to the characters themselves. The film is more taxing with its subject matter than we’re used to in dramas like this, but perhaps a small statement is being made about how mental illness should be portrayed on screen.

As the film opens, we meet Steve Lopez (Robert Downey, JR.), a reporter for the L.A. Times, at a miserable time in his life. He’s suffered a painful bicycle accident, his marriage is falling apart, and his journalistic juices appear to be running out. One day, Lopez finds writing inspiration through Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a homeless man in downtown L.A. Nathaniel appears to be a mentally disturbed man who constantly plays a violin with two strings. After various conversations with Nathaniel and some investigative reporting, Lopez discovers that Nathaniel was once a gifted musician at Julliard who dropped out for mysterious reasons and now lives out his existence as a homeless performer. Lopez prints his article and it strikes a chord in the heartstrings of its readers, becoming a popular column.

Lopez decides to do what he can to help his troubled new muse, but that turns out to be a very difficult and draining experience. Nathaniel shows serious signs of schizophrenia yet refuses conventional help and treatment. He feels more at home in the shabby homeless shelters that haunt L.A. instead of the generous comforts Lopez tries to dish out. Nathaniel’s condition makes him a rollercoaster of unpredictable emotions, making it increasingly difficult for Lopez to make a serious connection with him. Lopez slowly begins to wonder if Nathaniel is actually beyond saving.

The Soloist is a film that veers off into small tangents of unforgettable sublimity. Director Joe Wright does the same thing here he did with Atonement: he takes a seemingly familiar concept and pumps it with a vivid atmosphere and wonderful visual details. There’s a scene where Nathaniel takes in a Beethoven recital that paints its musical notes in beautiful bright colors and is visually brilliant. Wright also gives great attention to the festering homeless environments of greater Los Angeles. As the characters and camera plunge right into the middle of this homeless world, we see the real faces and problems of this environment firsthand. Wright spends a lot of time establishing the homeless sections of the film and why our standard attempts to combat the problem fail. Wright develops this so strongly that it almost becomes what the film is truly about (the ending crawl informs us that over 90,000 homeless people inhabit L.A. today).

The film is at its most brilliant and disturbing in its depiction of mental illness. Flashbacks show Nathaniel in his youth and at Julliard developing the paranoia and voices that will cripple him in his adult life. Wright puts us right inside Nathaniel’s mind, allowing us to hear these negative voices and how they cloud him from functioning in the real world. It’s a truly terrifying sight to behold. This horror is only elevated by the convincing performance from Foxx; the look of despair in his eyes is truly haunting. This film one-ups A Beautiful Mind in capturing the disturbing heartbreak of a schizophrenic illness.

These smaller details are so wonderfully constructed that we wonder why the film’s central relationship doesn’t have a similar impact. We sense a strong connection between these unlikely counterparts, but we don’t feel the full power of it. The structure of this screen relationship is obviously modeled after Rain Man, yet it lacks the close-knit intimacy of that film. The film is so eager to wander off into its peculiar visual scenes that the momentum needed to build the main friendship suffers considerably. Perhaps the performances have something to do with this; so enigmatic is Foxx and so ambiguous is Downey that maybe this relationship isn’t meant to be emotionally involving as it seems. Downey’s portrayal of Lopez is so resourceful that his actions toward Nathaniel seem both heartfelt and impersonal at the same time.

Perhaps Wright is using The Soloist to show how mental illness is too complex to fit so easily into a heartfelt drama. Throughout cinema, the portrayal of it has developed into a curious form of screen sentiment, sacrificing painful accuracy for comfortable dramatic requirements. It says something that Rain Man produced a formula that has been used time and time again. Wright shows no compromise in producing the horrors and heartbreak of schizophrenia and refuses to smooth it over to fit into a typical Hollywood tale. His style of filmmaking is certainly rebellious of typical structure; it appears to have an off-the-cuff artistic eye that is more interested in real life details than plot demands. Atonement centered on a character who sought a redemption that never fully arrived and we can sense Wright expressing this same lost redemption through Lopez’s efforts. The film shows more of his frustrations with Nathaniel than his joy. There’s a gut-wrenching scene towards the end where he realizes he may have made zero progress in helping Nathaniel and his condition.

While the film isn’t a complete success, The Soloist still contains unforgettable passages and one of the most harrowing portrayals of mental illness the screen has ever seen. It further proves that Joe Wright is one of the most original directors working today and that Downey and Foxx are two of the most gifted actors we have. And while it’s not as emotionally involving as Rain Man, it truly makes you wonder if you could ever look at such a film the same ever again.