Soloist, The

The most outstanding thing to be said for Joe Wright's The Soloist is how surprisingly much it does not suck. Sure, it has moments of insufferable self-importance and overt symbolism. Ocassionally it drips with unadulterated schmaltz. Jamie Foxx is not an especially gifted actor. We've seen the story a billion times before with different window dressing.

Yet, somehow, it works on many levels.

I suppose it's the way there is always something heartening about the inspiring qualities of art that affect our otherwise sad and dull lives. How music can heal the stricken and at least temporarily ease the suffering. There is a lot of power in those possibilities and to appreciate the arts that way, if only fleetingly, is to call forth the better beasts of our nature and spirit.

I had an argument with a friend a few years back. A true philistine, she, who posited that there was as much creativity and beauty in the works of our best financial minds (she's a CPA and CFP) as there was to be found in the creations of Michelangelo or Mozart or Dali. A sort of Donald Trump trumps Flaubert worldview.

I slapped the piss out of her right on the spot and told her to never speak to me again. I am kidding, of course, I never smite women, but her statement represented to me all that is cockeyed and wrong regarding the intrinsic worth and noble aspirations of humankind. When people start believing there is equal elegance and grace between a balance sheet and a symphony, then we are simply fucked.

There are many people like my friend out there.

And The Soloist is not their kind of film. Or maybe it is. Because it does allow for a short, superficial gaze into the aesthetic without miring the viewer in the gory details of the creative and freeing process of art. My friend would insist there should be manuals for that nonsense.

Based on the non-fiction book by journalist Steve Lopez, the film is essentially the friendship that forms between two men. One is a schizophrenic street person, Nathaniel Ayers (Foxx), with an exceptional musical talent. The other, Lopez (Robert Downey, Jr.), a reporter for the L.A. Times.

Lopez, seemingly bored by the typical human interest stories he writes for the paper, discovers the homeless Ayers playing a beat-up violin beneath a statue of Beethoven. The reporter recognizes the seeds of an interesting story and begins to insinuate himself in Ayers' life. A friendship kindles, the feature is a success and the two men are thrown closer together than they ever imagined.

The film's more powerful moments are in showing the unlikely bond the men create despite their disparate statuses and the redemptive power of art and music which can transcend race, class and illness.

Wright (Atonement, Pride & Prejudice) simultaneously captures the beauty and seediness of Los Angeles and its people. In Lopez's cynical reality, it is a rotting megalopolis, teeming with street trash and menace where, occasionally, the most gorgeous of flowers can bloom. To the disturbed Ayers, its streets are refuge from the horrible bugaboos of his own mind and past. Wright also uses the L.A. Times and the newspaper industry's avalanching demise as a metaphorical backdrop for our culture's lack of appreciation of anything other than the superficial or crass.

Ultimately The Soloist is just another watery-eyed celebration of the human spirit seen through the prism of music. But it's a bit smarter, more restive and grimmer around the edges than its ilk.

And the best part of it? It proves my friend's bullshit theory wrong.

Accountants as artists my ass!

Comments

[jjmitch21]

Decent film. Enjoyed it.