The Soloist

The holy fool has a rich and vivid history in literature and film. Director Joe Wright's The Soloist freely offers the latest example in the story of newspaper reporter Steve Lopez's writings about and intermixture with Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless-in-Los Angeles former musical prodigy from Juilliard displaying all the classic symptoms of  schizophrenia. The plot revolves around a   curious budding friendship between the two after an accidental "meet-cute" encounter in a Los Angeles park where Nathaniel is playing a two-stringed violin (though his real instrument is the cello) in front of a statue of Beethoven, his idol, which becomes the inspiration for a series of articles in The Los Angeles Times, eventuating in a book called The Soloist: a Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music.

That last adjective points to a debilitating hole in an otherwise admirable film. The acting is formidable, though Robert Downey's Lopez may occasionally overdo the underplayed, reactive response to Jamie Foxx's more emotive, flares-flourishing Nathaniel -- an affectless voice is not the only answer to sturm und drang. The script by Susannah Grant, known for Erin Brockovich, efficiently and sympathetically limns the architecture of an evolving friendship, making only minor changes to the actual facts, like creating a divorced wife who is now Lopez's editor, played by Catherine Keener in usual sublime fashion.

But back to that "redemptive" thing.   Production notes speak of Nathaniel's cooperation with both the book and the film, and thus his presumed concurrence in the fact that he has been "redeemed." But is this the case? Can this be the case? Or have we here another romanticized depiction of the sacred loon, the mentally wounded genius, a la One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Rain Man, Shine, et al? The issue of giving Nathaniel clearly called-for medication is addressed weakly  several times -- "he doesn't want to take them" or "we can't force him unless he's an immediate danger to himself or others"-- but even after several dangerous and explicit acts of violence, there is still no medicating. Instead we get rather extended close-ups of Nathaniel's rapture at Disney Hall  listening to Esa-Pekka Salonen's conducting of the Los Angeles Philarmonic while being "redeemed." It is hard not to think that a pill or two might not beat out a nocturne for redemption or for even greater rapture over Beethoven and Bach.

One highlight of the film is the use of the Lamp Community, a sort of Skid Row area that gives help and then shelter to Nathaniel. The actual community is occasionally filmed and some of its occupants serve as extras. The scenes of the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall are reverentially filmed, and Esa-Pekka Salonen shows a firm arm. The only technical wrong note is the here-and-there attempt to render the music visually, with kaleidoscopic colors and abstractions on the screen as music plays. Distracting, at best.

                                                          Howard Buck