Director: Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement)
Book: Steve Lopez
Screenplay: Susannah Grant
Producers: Gary Foster , Russ Krasnoff
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Jamie Foxx, Catherine Keener
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running time: 109 min

(3/5)

Has there been in recent memory a more maligned film by virtue of its marketing campaign than Joe Wright’s The Soloist? Like the overkill of the Vantage Point trailers in every theater and seemingly in front of every film I saw in 2008, The Soloist was sold to the public in a way which had an adverse effect, sure people were talking about it, but what they had to say wasn’t pretty. Shelved nearly half a year, the film is being unloaded the weekend before the summer movie season begins, a notorious dumping ground for beleaguered projects. Is this a colossal fuck-up by the marketing department, a heavy-handed trailer edit of the movie’s dramatic value to court the Academy’s quaint notions of worth, or is the source material ultimately at fault?

Having now seen the film, I would have to say it’s a bit of both. The uncomfortably naïve evocation of liberal guilt and white man’s burden as depicted through the trials and tribulations of L.A. Times reporter, Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.), in his efforts to befriend Nathaniel Ayers, a Julliard trained musician since homeless (Jamie Foxx), is palpable in the script. Driven home through the voice-overs as Steve talks into his tape recorder and through the clumsy exposition as he confides to his ex-wife (Catherine Keener), the story is forever pivoting around social touchstones that make this just the kind of touchy feely public interest column that I suspect garnered Lopez his book deal in the first place. The only saving grace in the storytelling is that the mental issues that Nathaniel is dealing with are not reduced to some particular event, even though strangely the flashbacks seem to suggest that just such a revelation is around the corner.

But despite these problems director Joe Wright uses everything in his arsenal to make this conventional story embodied with a sense of life. With the actual story glazing over in my mind, for me the real significance I drew from the experience was how persistently ambitious Wright was in trying to tell this story visually even though such ambition seemed futile from the get go. The Soloist, if nothing else, shows that even when he fails, Wright is an adeptly imaginative director that is worth watching. In particular his efforts at recreating the headspace of the mentally unstable Nathaniel work better than they should, as set pieces deserving of a better movie, and these flourishes are not accurately represented in the trailer. One showstopper in particular pushes the boundaries into complete abstraction as we get to experience music through Nathaniel and if nothing else, the Soloist succeeds in this scene. On the topic of music and sound, while the classical numbers performed in the film never quite grabbed me in the way they were intended (a fault not of the film, but of differing taste), the use of sound as a whole in the film is exceptional, allowing the noises of Los Angeles to serve as a symphonic backdrop at times in tandem with Nathaniel’s performances.

Further refinements are made by the central performances. The dialogue taken out of context is not so bad, but when stitched together to force spontaneous character developments, it takes a certain caliber of performance to sell it, and for the most part, Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. do just that. Jamie Foxx in particular plays it relatively restrained, and far better than the trailer would make you believe. Robert Downey Jr. sells the friendship angle even when the plot points haven’t adequately earned it, and with the exception of a couple clunky montage scenes, he is convincing enough to make one realize the acting is not the problem here.

Despite valiant efforts by a lot of the talent involved there is just not enough polish to compensate for this turd of a screenplay. I never fully felt the impetus for the friendship between Lopez and Ayers, and while each character got their chance to chew scenery, none of it escapes the liberal guilt black hole that is the overarching structure of the story. This kind of story can be told, despite its pitfalls. Half-Nelson, is an excellent example of restraint while indirectly addressing issues of race and class. The problem with The Soloist is that it doesn’t seem to have much more on its mind than the symbols that the characters embodied, the themes that could be exploited, the message before the movie.