Reel Reflections

“The Soloist”— Flawed Genius, Flawed Film

A Review 

David Greiser

Iadmit that I came to “The Soloist” with a level of personal investment. I loved the writing of Steve Lopez back in the 1990s when Lopez was a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirerand I was living in the city. In fact, I would occasionally quote his columns in sermons to the urban congregation I then served as pastor. I was crushed when Lopez took the money and ran to Los Angeles (back to his boyhood home, as it turned out) to work for the L.A.Times.

During those years I also carried a never-ending fascination for the phenomenon of urban homelessness. How was it that the richest country in the world could allow so many people to sleep on its city streets? How was it that certain people actually preferred to sleep on newspaper unrolled over a heating grate, rather than spending the night in a heated room on a mattress?

For me the questions at one point became even more personal. For a time, my wife and I befriended a schizophrenic man in our apartment building who occasionally would go off his medicine and spend several nights in a nearby park.

“The Soloist” helped me to re-experience those years of my life without bringing me closer to finding answers to my questions. The film is based (rather loosely, at points) on the true story of Steve Lopez (played by Robert Downey Jr.) and his real-life relationship with Nathaniel Ayers (played by Jamie Foxx). Lopez discovers Ayers in Los Angeles’ Pershing Park, sitting at the feet of a statue of Beethoven and playing Beethoven’s music on a violin with two strings.

Nathaniel’s rambling speech suggests a serious mental illness, but when he mentions as an aside that he once attended the Juilliard School, an otherwise disinterested Lopez decides the man is worth one column. When a reader sends Lopez a cello for Nathaniel, the one-off column becomes a relationship.

A conventional Hollywood plot would suggest that the two men would go on to develop a relationship which at first is strained but eventually reaches a revelatory moment in which each man discovers that the other has something that he needs to become whole. A less conventional plot line—one more worthy of recognition at Oscar time—would tell a harder hitting tale with a sad ending. Since this is a true story and not either of the above, the actual plot falls somewhere in between. Possibly for that reason, it is hard to track or to describe the emotional tone of this film.

“The Soloist” does several things very well. Through the effective use of actual homeless people and scenes shot in and around a real-life shelter (credit director Joe Wright for these) the film provides an unsparing portrait of a homeless community. We feel Lopez’ disorientation and fear as he seeks out Nathaniel’s overnight habitat, on streets where crack addicts suck on pipes and couples huddle against chain link fences. Hollow eyes seem to follow Lopez everywhere he goes.

The film also excels in its portrayal of the social service workers who serve the homeless community. When Lopez insists that a social worker should help him to force Nathaniel to be committed for treatment, the social worker calmly explains that unless Nathaniel is an imminent threat to himself or someone else, he cannot simply be locked away. Diagnosis of mental illness is an inexact practice; offering a man trust and friendship, the social worker suggests, may do more to help him in the long run than medication. The social workers in “The Soloist” are less saints than weary workers whose organizations are completely understaffed and underfunded.

The movie loses its way when it tries to fill out its characters through sidebar stories. For some reason the director decides that Lopez needs an ex-wife who is also his boss (played by Catherine Keener), with whom he can presumably show us the self-centered jerk he was before meeting Nathaniel and learning that people exist to be loved and not simply written about. Middlebrow Hollywood convention seems to require that characters in stories learn “lessons.” Since the real-life Lopez was never divorced, and since the addition of this detail does little to advance the story, one can only guess at the reason for such a dramatic decision.

The other area in which the film struggles is in the always tricky depiction of mental illness. For two-thirds of the story, Nathaniel appears docile and relatively articulate. When he becomes suddenly violent, then just as quickly apologizes for his outburst, it seems to come out of nowhere. The common emotional arc of schizophrenia suggests that greater realism would have been achieved if Nathaniel’s anger had been a recognizable part of his personality throughout the film.

Despite these weaknesses, “The Soloist” is a worthwhile two hours. It takes us no closer to finding answers to the problem of homelessness—but suggests that until the solutions of experts are found, the caring of willing amateurs may be the most honest, humanizing response we can imagine.

—Dave Greiser spends his nights on a memory foam mattress next to his wife of thirty years, Anita. He lives and teaches in Hesston, Kansas.