Director Joe Wright’s winning streak – Pride and Prejudice, Atonement – appeared to come to an end with the US release of The Soloist earlier this year. A big, showy picture anchored by not one but two Oscar winners, the film’s release was delayed beyond awards season – never a good sign – and received solid if unenthusiastic notices last April.
The Soloist is a smarter, better picture than this brief, ignoble history suggests. Based on a True Life Story, on paper, it reads like classic Academy schmaltz; cynical Los Angeles Times hack Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) discovers Nathaniel Anthony Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a former Julliard musical prodigy, playing his violin on the streets of L.A. The former’s attempts to get the homeless Ayers into accommodation coupled with the Redemptive Power of Music should, theoretically, see both men emerge as kinder, gentler people by the final reel.
But The Soloist eschews these easy clichés; RDJ, though restrained and subtle in terms of performance, never quite throws off his angry loner status; nobody ever announces that Mr. Foxx, a muddled, unnerving stream of consciousness, is All Better Now. Their friendship is an uneasy affair. If anything, it’s the down and out schizophrenic who emerges as the more rounded of the pair.
This courageously complex dynamic is somewhat undermined by the director’s (admittedly commendable) attempts to represent music on screen. We could live with the Synesthesic colour displays, but even Seamus McGarvey’s fine photography cannot make birds flying into the heavens to the strains of Beethoven seem like anything other than a thundering chestnut.
Frustratingly for stringophiles, the score never allows the cello – Nathaniel Ayers’ primary means of expression – to do the talking. We’re never more than a few bars in before the orchestra pipes up, as if the filmmakers cannot trust the instrument to sound sweet on its own. The Soloist is not a soloist often enough for our liking.