It's fitting that 'The Soloist' is about a man with schizophrenia, because the film has some schizophrenic leanings of its own.
It doesn't know whether it wants to be a comedy with heart, or an art flick, or a gritty character drama, and instead of choosing settles on being a disjointed mess.
The film follows the chance meeting and gradual friendship of Steve Lopez, a Los Angeles Times columnist upon whose real-life book the film is based, and Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, a cello virtuoso whose schizophrenia led him to drop out of Juilliard and roam the streets of LA as a homeless musician.
Robert Downey Jr, in imminent danger of being typecast as the wounded, witty, down-on-his-luck hero (In this case, Lopez,) does a good job of anchoring the film, whether he’s being drenched in coyote urine or looking nervous and out of place on the mean streets of the ghetto. He adds a certain pathos and believability to scenes that, frankly, don’t deserve it.
The film, however truly shines when Downey and Jaime Foxx (portraying Nathaniel) are in the same frame. Foxx deserves an Oscar for his acting- he has one of the hardest performances of all time, and not because he’s playing someone with mental disorder, but because he has to show the full range of this disorder and still have the audience’s sympathy.
It’s no small feat when, towards the end of the film, he lapses into chilling, violent schizophrenic rage, and we’re still rooting for him, and if the filmmakers deserve any credit for anything in this movie, it’s for the simple fact that they didn’t whitewash or roll over the darker moments.
It’s a shame then, that so much of the movie is so poorly done. For the first 30 minutes or so, it feels like the actors lines aren’t even synching up to one another. An extended tracking shot that’s supposed to show the ‘busyness and intensity of a newspaper office’ is so poorly rehearsed and pointless I felt like I was watching a middle school play.
There are, in fact, a veritable mountain of pointless things in this movie. Side-characters who are introduced, named, and then cast aside, contributing nothing. Plot threads that seem to be pointing toward some future event only to be cast aside.
At one point, the mayor of LA decides to allot $50 million dollars to fight homelessness because of one of Lopez’s articles. Towards the end of the film, some cops bust in and haul a bunch of homeless people away as Lopez scours the streets for signs of his friend.
Is there a connection? Is this the mayor’s idea of a cleanup? Was there a riot? Did it just look good on film? We have no idea, and the film never explains itself. You get the sense that almost a full hour was cut from the movie- and nobody had the sense to pay attention to what they were cutting.
Still though, the film contains several bright little transcendent moments that showed it really had potential, and given what else is playing in theaters right now, you could really do a lot worse.
