The Soloist

I had expected rather a poor film from it’s 54% positive aggregate reviews on RottonTomatoes.com (half a year ago; damn they keep things delayed for the UK market), but actually found it to be a rather good film that could have been better than it was, mostly because of strange directorial decisions, and that great pitfall of making a drama out of live-action featuring the living, trying to find a satisfying conclusion to a story that after all has not finished, which will not end up in denouncements and suing.

Robert Downey Jr. is excellent, making Lopez sympathetic and comprehensible, although we really didn’t need comic scenes involving urine (yes, ‘scenes’, plural) to get on his side, which seemed too slapstick and hard to believe. Jamie Foxx was convincing and able to carry off both the vulnerability and frightening ‘otherness’ of Ayers, although I wish the filmmakers had taken just that little bit more time to make him more convincingly look like he was really playing the cello like a virtuoso. All you would need would be a shot or two.

And this is the problem. Just a little bit more care and attention would have improved the whole greatly. Another draft of the script to hone it and give it direction. Someone to rein in director Joe Wright, who perhaps flush with the success of Atonement shows off with some painfully inadequate and 70s-esque attempts to show onscreen what synaesthesia looks like (great flashing blobs shown for far too long) and what it’s like to be a schizophrenic (it would seem that it is like a strange television channel airing looped footage of a baby crying while several voices talk at once), and those flourishes became one of my real gripes. The way that Lopez could walk through seriously depraved areas of New York, leave his car in the road, walk past fights and have nothing more happen to him than nasty looks, not to mention not a single scratch being left on the car, also didn’t quite work.

These are not major concerns, though, and the film as a whole is good. It just seldom really feels heartfelt, more an Oscar ploy than a story that needed to be told, which with this sort of subject matter, is what you need. It also suffers from not really establishing its world – we don’t really get to see what exactly the reader of the column is told about Ayers, how much of the abrupt flashbacks Lopez knows at any given time, what Ayers does between being something of a redemptive ‘Magical Negro’ figure. And that is a shame.