The homeless are everywhere.
Even in Evanston, it would be difficult to walk the streets for a half an hour without getting asked for spare change by a man sitting on a milk crate or seeing a worn-out drifter seeking rest on a park bench. Venture into Chicago and such encounters increase in frequency a hundredfold. Each street person is homeless, each is hurting and each has a story of how he or she got there. The Soloist, in theaters April 24, explores one of the nation’s most notoriously poverty-ridden areas, Los Angeles’ Skid Row. The movie paints a grim picture of the area; the exhausted homeless are lying everywhere and one of the protagonists, a journalist, can’t walk or drive through without getting hassled by menacing groups or offered drugs.
It was in this environment that Nathaniel Anthony Ayers Jr., a virtuoso cellist who at one point attended Juilliard, landed after (or rather during) a period of dislocation resulting from an onset of schizophrenia. When Ayers finally surfaced in Pershing Square Park playing a two-stringed violin, he was with only as many belongings as could fit in a single shopping cart. The transition, like that of many who fall from better conditions, was sudden, blameless and silent but for the constant melody of his bow on the strings.
The Soloist is Ayers’ story as well as that of the man who found him, Los Angeles Times writer Steve Lopez (portrayed by Robert Downey Jr.). At first, Lopez sees Ayers (Jamie Foxx) as purely a column idea — when he is falsely told that Juilliard had no record of the musician, he forgets all about Ayers until the secretary calls back, correcting her error. The film chronicles the progression of their unique relationship. At certain junctures we see the columnist crossing Ayers’ name off a legal pad, the musician calling Lopez his “God,” Ayers standing over a disgruntled Lopez threatening to “gut him like a fish,” and the two men dancing together.
Foxx and Downey are both wonderful in their respective roles. Foxx captures the mumbling musician’s idiosyncrasies masterfully, while Downey creates a believably wry Lopez character with just the right amount of compassion. These are accurate portrayals, embodying even the physical. As Lopez described the filming process in a conference-call interview: “Within a couple weeks, it was pretty eerie because Jamie Foxx in makeup and costume looked and sounded and walked just like Nathaniel. It was almost difficult to tell the two of them apart.”
From the film’s opening shots, it is clear that the tale is as much about journalism as it is about homelessness. We see the story unfold from Lopez’s perspective most of the time, and director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement) does all he can to show us inside each character’s head. We hear Lopez composing his column along the way, giving us a good look at the creative process. A few grim statements about the state of the newspaper industry are thrown in, and the writer is seen investigating a few other phenomena for the Times, which provides some funny moments as well as reminding the audience of the ever looming deadlines in the life of a journalist.
Wright’s portrayal of Ayers and his fellow transients is often a poignant one. His vision of Skid Row — featuring its real-life denizens playing themselves — is frightening at times, heartbreaking at others. The director also shows the intensity with which Ayers’ experiences music in a number of instances. One of the most moving moments is Ayers’ first contact with a donated cello. Watching Foxx’s face is akin to seeing happiness in its purest form. In another scene, we literally see the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s rendition of Beethoven’s Third, complete with colored visuals that bring the music to life like something out of Fantasia.
One of the film’s weaknesses is that the passage of time was not as apparent as it probably should have been. The events of The Soloist took place over four years, which is significant in terms of the scope of the relationship between Lopez and Ayers. However, this is not evident; to the viewer, only a couple of months could have passed.
The ending is rather weak, as well, partially because the journey is still in progress. Lopez recalls a conversation with the producers: “I had no idea where the story was going … I said ‘How can you make the movie not knowing the ending?’ They said ‘We don’t need to worry about the ending. This is a story about two guys who have come together from different walks of life and have a lasting impact on each other.’” The producers missed the mark on this one — “worrying about the ending” is important here, and as it stands the audience is unsatisfied, craving more information that never comes.
That aside, the film is highly compelling. Lopez himself sums it up quite well: “It’s a love story, it’s a friendship story, it’s about the power of friendship and the power of music, the serendipitous nature of a chance encounter that changes two lives.” Wright’s superb direction brings together two rock-solid acting performances, but in the end it’s the strength of the tale being told that makes the telling so great.