"The Soloist" is actually a duet on the theme of redemption. It's scored for two very different though equally remarkable actors, and performed with uncanny bravura. Jamie Foxx is Nathaniel Ayers, a schizophrenic street musician who was once a distinguished student at Juilliard. Robert Downey Jr. is Steve Lopez, the Los Angeles Times columnist who first befriended Ayers in 2005, then wrote about their friendship in a series of columns and a book that inspired the movie. The fictional version, directed by Joe Wright from a screenplay by Susannah Grant, occasionally suffers from a surfeit of inspirationalism, but its core is marvelously alive and complex. My sense of the experience was summed up by a moment when Nathaniel, sitting in on an L.A. Philharmonic rehearsal at Disney Hall, says with intense pleasure, "It's the way it should be."
Robert Downey Jr. as Steve Lopez and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Ayers in 'The Soloist.'Should be, and seldom is. Films have romanticized mental illness, as in "Shine," or surrealized it, as in "A Beautiful Mind," but this one plays essentially fair with it. Music is Nathaniel's only refuge from the terrors and confusions of a merciless brain disease that ravaged his talent, destroyed his shining future as a classical cellist and defies anything resembling a cure. The movie is no less successful in its portrait of a journalist working at his craft. Other films, most recently "State of Play," reach for the fraught drama of contemporary journalism, but this one nails a host of authentic details -- Steve Lopez's paper has already begun the slide that imperils its future -- along with a special spirit. Far from being a bleeding heart, Lopez starts his journey of discovery as a self-ironic reporter on the trail of a good story.
Although movies often borrow the emotional power of great music, "The Soloist" boasts its own rich dynamics and contrasting tonalities. Mr. Foxx's musician provides the passion. Nathaniel cuts a bizarre figure as he plays a two-stringed violin in a downtown park near a statue of his beloved Beethoven. Still, his garish clothes barely hint at the florid disorder of his mind, which makes itself known through enthralling soliloquies that sound like the spiritual equivalent of a racing engine and a slipping clutch. By contrast, Mr. Downey's columnist provides a bracing coolness, at least at first. Equipped with the actor's characteristically clipped vocal rhythms, Steve tries to resist taking on responsibility for his subject's tumultuous life. It's hard to imagine these roles played by anyone else, even though Mr. Foxx played another passionate musician, Ray Charles, not long ago. The co-stars are both virtuosos, and their styles combine to create a harmony of friendship that cannot fix the unfixable, or redeem the irredeemable, but gradually grows into mutual help and a kind of love.
At certain points less might have been more: the overuse of orchestral power; the over-lyrical flight of symbolic birds (and camera cranes); the decision to make Nathaniel a musical genius right up there with Rostropovich rather than a merely notable talent; the false note that ensues when he seems unfamiliar with Bach's peerless cello suites. Instead of the hell on earth that was skid row in downtown L.A. when the story begins, the movie evokes a circle of Dante's Inferno. The religious zealotry of a professional cellist is a clumsily written intrusion. The script, which fictionalizes Steve Lopez into a divorcé, insists overmuch on similarities between his fear of becoming responsible for Nathaniel and his failings in married life (although Catherine Keener, wonderfully appealing as his ex-wife, is especially so in the scene that draws the parallels most closely.)
Yet these are smallish blemishes on a beautiful whole, and a beautifully photographed whole: Seamus McGarvey, who shot Joe Wright's previous film, "Atonement," has done superb work in sequence after sequence, including some downward-looking helicopter shots that juxtapose the eerie sprawl of Los Angeles with the spacious grandeur of a Beethoven symphony. Mr. Wright and his colleagues have made a movie with a spaciousness of its own, a brave willingness to explore such mysteries of the mind and heart as the torture that madness can inflict, and the rapture that music can confer. Bravo to all concerned.
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