THE SOLOIST

Though Jamie Foxx gets the showier role of a mentally ill homeless musician, it is Robert Downey, Jr. that steals the show (again) in The Soloist.

Robert Downey, Jr. unsurprisingly steals the show from Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx in what is basically a two-man movie. The Soloist is really Downey's show despite the fact that his character is focusing on Foxx's homeless musican Nathaniel Ayers. We try to focus on Foxx, too, but really we just want to be watching Downey, he's that good.

Downey plays Steve Lopez, a columnist for The Los Angeles Times. Since this is a movie (based on a true story, mind you), Steve is the type of columnist that always seems to get his stories on the front page. Um, whatever. I understand the cinematic appeal of not having to open a newspaper to read a story, but still. Anyways, after riding his bike in the wee hours of the morning, and practically busting his head open trying not to hit a raccoon, Steve finds himself with a story in a most unusual place. While wandering around a city park with a curiously-placed Beethoven statue, he is lured by the music of a homeless man sawing on a two-stringed violin. The man says his name is Nathaniel Anthony Ayers that he had attended Julliard, and, well, a whole string of rambling words and thoughts that run together in an endless no-eye-contact sentence. Lopez is intrigued.

After a little sleuthing, Lopez discovers that Ayers indeed was in Julliard for a couple years in the early 70s, but dropped out when he became mentally ill. It is pretty much spelled out for the viewer (and for Lopez) that his illness is schizophrenia. The word itself, Lopez learns, is one of the few things to completely set off the gentle Ayers. Lopez wants to help, and even get him on meds to help quell the confusion in his head, but a social worker makes it clear that such a step would have to be made by Ayers himself.

This is definitely an interesting story, and certainly moving. However the filmmaker makes a few missteps in the storytelling that don't quite fit. Though it is clearly told from Lopez's point of view (for instance, when the two men are not together, we don't know where Ayers is), but there are personal flashbacks into Ayers' past to explain some of his issues. Since Ayers can barely rattle off a cohesive sentence, it was a little unbelievable that we'd get a peek into the time when he lived alone in an apartment during college, and slowly started to lose his grip on every-day functioning. We also see a visual representation of how Ayers hears music, and while interesting and memorable, it didn't really make sense in the flow of the storytelling.

But despite these flaws, The Soloist is an extremely well-acted character study of two men hesitantly becoming friends. Lopez wants to save Ayers because he is a screw-up in his own personal life (his ex-wife, and boss, is played by the always hot and acerbic Catherine Keener). Lopez takes hesitant, well-meaning steps forward in his attempts to help Ayers, only to be thwarted over and over again by the stark (and sometimes frightening) reminders that Ayers is indeed mentally ill and out of reach of Lopez's best intentions. The Soloist is a somber portrayal of the forgotten and damaged people that live in the shadows of our urban streets, humanizing those that most of us choose to ignore.

DVD NOTES

The DVD of The Soloist includes a making-of documentary "An Unlikely Friendship: Making The Soloist"; feature commentary by director Joe Wright; a featurette about real-life homelessness in Los Angeles; another featurette about the friendship between Mr. Ayers and Mr. Lopez; plus some deleted scenes and some more.