The Soloist
In which Robert Downey Junior plays Steve Lopez, a columnist for the LA Times who discovers a muscial genius playing a two-stringed violin on the streets. The musical genius in question is Nathaniel Ayers, played by Jaime Foxx, who has been sleeping rough since he left the Juliard school of music when he began to hear voices. Lopez takes interest initially to fill a void in subject matter for his column, but soon becomes the central facet to Ayers’s rehabilitation (or so he thinks).
Downey Junior is as enigmatic as usual. There’s a caustic scene where Lopez is covered in coyote piss, which he is attempting to hang in his garden to ward off raccoons. I could actually smell the urine. The film is also spliced with Ayers’s backstory. Him as a child playing the cello while fires burn outside his house. Him playing in an orchestra as the voices in his head begin for the first time. Him breaking down in front of his sister and attempting to forcefeed her soup.
Foxx plays the mental illness of Ayers well. At first you think that maybe he’s just eccentric. Then, when the schizophrenia becomes obvious, it isn’t overplayed. Ayers himself does not consider himself to be mentally ill. Lopez tries his utmost to force him onto medication before coming to the realisation that he should just try to be his friend. There is also an interesting theme as Ayers begins to entwine himself around Lopez’s life (at one point he calls him his god). By this point, we are well aware of Ayers’s schizophrenia. As he begins to communicate with Lopez more and more, his incessant chatter mirrors the voices in his own head. In one scene, Ayers witters into Lopez’s phone as Lopez sits at a gala dinner at which he is collecting an award for his writing on Ayers. There’s a subtle exchange of identity here.
The whole thing is played sensitively and it feels authentic. Despite the possibility of corn, as Lopez realises that friendship is the best medication that Ayers could receive, the ending is not sloppy or sentimental. Ayers is not miraculously cured, and neither does he entertain thousands at Carnegie Hall. The resolution to his story is in actual fact far more subtle. As is the resolution to Lopez’s story. His story arc takes him from a self-absorbed hack to a man far more in tune with the world around him. It isn’t a steep arc, and by no means unbelievable. It is subtle and slow. Ultimately, it is true.
