The Soloist

Playing for keeps: Two lives at loose ends struggle for harmony in 'The Soloist'

April 24, 2009|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

In "The Soloist," Jamie Foxx lets his hair go nappy and swaddles himself in layers of filthy cast-off clothing as Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless and mentally ill Los Angeles street musician. Avoiding eye contact, Nathaniel chatters on in paranoid schizophrenic arias of dysfunctional connection, and you can practically smell the self-righteous Hollywood funk rising off the character.

It's director Joe Wright, though, who brings that funk more than Foxx or Robert Downey Jr., playing the real-life LA Times columnist who befriends Nathaniel and tries to help him. If you've seen the trailer for "The Soloist" - and you probably have, since the film was originally slated for release during last year's Oscar season only to be pulled at the last minute - you may be expecting an inspirational tale in the vein of "Shine," another film about a lost artist who gets his groove back. And you may be expecting the sort of self-congratulatory star gambit wickedly exposed by Downey's monologue last year in "Tropic Thunder," about actors who shoot for awards-season glory by going "the full retard."

Things swiftly sort themselves out, however. Seasoned pros that they are, Foxx and Downey attend to their charac ters and leave the overreaching to Wright. Foxx in particular understands that since Nathaniel can barely deal with the other people in the movie, he can't possibly play to the audience in the seats. It turns out that "The Soloist" isn't so much a story of perseverance and musical triumph as it is of despair, acceptance, and social commitment. The movie's a call to arms: We are our brothers' keepers, it says, and our brothers are in terrible shape.

Nathaniel attended Juilliard, which right there spells a story for Downey's Steve Lopez, banged up from a recent bike accident and himself isolated from his fellow man (and fictional ex-wife, editor Catherine Keener). The movie hints that one of the reasons the nation's newspapers are in such a fix is that they pursue gimmicky human-interest journalism instead of the underlying issues of poverty and societal neglect; it chides us for wanting the feel-good movie the trailer promised us. (I still say it's the Internet.)