FILM: 'The Soloist' connects with humanity on L.A. streets

By Donovan Jacobs, April 27, 2009 [Episcopal News Service] We live in troubled times – times where too many people both withdraw into themselves and ignore (even more than usual) the plight of those less fortunate. While it may fall short on some levels, the new film The Soloist deserves praise for confronting us with the danger of living in this way and emphasizing our need to connect, especially with individuals whose humanity can be hard to embrace.

Based on a true story, The Soloist stars Robert Downey Jr. as Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, who initially meets homeless, schizophrenic Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) playing the violin – brilliantly, even though the battered instrument only has two strings. Lopez learns that Ayers was a former student at the Juilliard music academy in New York whose passion for classical music remains undimmed after more than 30 years. But as Lopez challenges Ayers to fulfill his potential by leaving the streets and treating his mental illness, Lopez is forced to explore his need to find true meaning in his life and a relationship to something larger than himself.

Director Joe Wright elicits nuanced, intelligent performances from Downey and Foxx, allowing the movie to work most effectively when it follows Lopez and Ayers while they slowly develop a greater sense of responsibility to each other and the world around them. Where The Soloist is less effective is when it switches from chronicling the lives of these characters to generating what feels like contrived conflict between Lopez and Ayers in order to build to a Hollywood-style dramatic climax.

But The Soloist performs a vital service by doing what few mainstream movies even attempt – listening to the stories and attempting to capture the humanity of the homeless individuals Ayers shares the streets with. Wright insisted on casting residents of Los Angeles' Skid Row as actors and extras, and the respect shown to these characters (mainly by portraying them in a straightforward, unsentimental way) gives the scenes at a beleaguered homeless services agency a sense of authentic warmth.

The Soloist features only one explicitly Christian character, a well-meaning musical mentor whose efforts to pray for and with Ayers are made to seem silly. And yet the movie asks questions that one could easily imagine Jesus posing: What is expected of us when we encounter the poor of body, mind and spirit? What allows us to go on day after day in the face of crushing misery and disorienting isolation?

The movie's most intriguing spiritual musings, however, involve Ayers and his devotion to great music. Ayers' commitment to the works of Beethoven has suffused his life with grace, a sense of meaning and joy that Lopez is humbled to realize he has never experienced. It can be all too trite when a movie suggests that the "crazy" are saner than "normal" people, but there's something truly profound and provocative in The Soloist's suggestion that Nathaniel Ayers, in losing everything but his music, has found the kingdom of God.

-- Donovan Jacobs is a Los Angeles-based film critic.

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