Movie Review: The Soloist

The Soloist, 2009. Directed by Joe Wright. Starring Robert Downey, Jr., Jamie Foxx, Catherine Keener.

In the "Making of The Soloist" special feature on the DVD, director Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement) remarks on his initial hesitation to direct the film:  as a native Brit, he'd only ever filmed movies about England in England. He was unsure he would be successful at directing a film set in Los Angeles dealing with homelessness in that city. Wright needn't have doubted himself one iota.

With The Soloist, Wright cements himself as one of my top five favorite directors. Even when the subject is gritty (such as homelessness in The Soloist), violent (Atonement), or hopelessly romantic (Pride & Prejudice), Wright executes his directorial vision with clear elegance. [I'm omitting here his film Hanna, which I have not yet seen. However, I'm adding it to my NetFlix queue likenow.] I imagine that on set, Wright likes to "let the camera run" on a scene and then edits those little tidbits and moments into the film--moments where we catch an actor sighing, scanning the setting with their eyes, or moving their hands in a way that adds both verisimilitude to the scene and depth to the character.


Wright, however, juxtaposes the toughness of life on the street and the feeling of hopelessness often associated with mental illness with the grace of music and art, and the human capacity for friendship that transforms lives. Elements such as Seamus McGarvey's thoughtful cinematography, Susannah Grant's screenplay (based on real-life newspaper columnist Steve Lopez's book The Soloist), and Sarah Greenwood's fitting art direction all enhance the overall feeling of the film. (Greenwood and Wright are frequent co-collaborators and have produced some amazingly lasting images in the past ten years of film; I think no better example of this the movie Atonement, especially the first two "parts".)

Foxx provides another carefully crafted, excellent performance as a musician in this film (see also: Ray, obviously). His innate sense of musicality as an actual musician provides for a freedom in acting as a man who plays multiple instruments in the film, including violin and cello. Foxx plays Nathaniel Ayers, a Julliard-trained cellist who loses everything when schizophrenia takes over his life. There is a great risk in playing someone with a mental illness, especially one as unpredictable as schizophrenia, yet Foxx accomplishes this with a sense of quiet power that almost makes the viewer forget that Ayers does suffer from a mental illness over which he has no control. In that sense, it's easy to see why Ayers embraces the beauty of the music he makes--because he can control it, and because he's creating something everyone loves.

Downey, Jr. acts as Foxx's foil as Los Angeles Times writer Steve Lopez. Lopez is one of those guys who's all business, constantly searching for his next great story; he doesn't have time for "human interest" even though that's what he writes about. To be honest, I think Downey didn't have to act much as Lopez; I think he often found a great deal of similarity between his own personality and Lopez's. Still, the strides Lopez makes throughout the film are not insignificant, especially when it seems like all the hard work he's put into helping Ayers might be for naught. The scenes where Downey and Foxx are acting together--and against each other--are the most energetic and interesting of the film.

At times, I found the plot a bit slow, but the film is punctuated with such moments of beauty--in the music, the cinematography, and in the acting--that it's easy to forgive a languid moment in passing.

My review: 8/10