The Times on The Soloist

The Soloist
Talented and troubled: the true story of the homeless classical musician who was given a second chanceToby Young


When Steve Lopez, a journalist for the Los Angeles Times, stumbled across a homeless man who claimed to have studied music at a New York conservatory he thought there might be a column in it. He did some research and, sure enough, Nathaniel Ayers had attended the Juilliard School. Lopez’s collection of columns about Ayers formed the basis of a book published last year that has now been adapted for the screen.

The Soloist arrives in British cinemas after a troubled history in America, where it was originally scheduled for release last November. Paramount Pictures, the studio with the US distribution rights, decided to put its end-of-year marketing muscle behind Revolutionary Road and Benjamin Button instead, clearly regarding them as more promising Oscar bait. The Soloist’s American release was pushed back to April of this year and it was pronounced dead on arrival at the box office, failing to hold its own against more commercial offerings.

This must have infuriated Working Title’s Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, who co-produced the film with DreamWorks, as well as Joe Wright, who was probably hoping for a Best Director nomination.

Wright’s ambition is on full display in The Soloist, at times threatening to upstage the performances of Robert Downey Jr as Lopez and Jamie Foxx as Ayers. There’s a cringeworthy sequence in which Wright attempts to convey just how noble and unbroken the homeless man’s spirit is by intercutting his violin playing with shots of pigeons flying over LA.

Wright’s self-advertising style is at odds with the downbeat message of the film, which urges us to show some humility in the face of intractable social problems such as homelessness. Lopez struggles to get Ayers back on his feet, finding him an apartment and landing him a gig at Disney Hall, the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

But Ayers is in two minds about whether he wants to be helped, not least because he’s schizophrenic. Lopez imagines that Ayers is just down on his luck and all he needs is a big break to achieve his dream. In fact, he has a history of mental illness and has already squandered several opportunities.

The Soloist was adapted for the cinema by Susannah Grant, who was Oscar- nominated for her screenplay of Erin Brockovitch, and she tries to make a virtue out of the story’s unconventional shape. “Life is more complicated than it appears to be in the movies,” she seems to be saying, and it’s difficult to escape the feeling that she and her collaborators regard themselves as superior to the purveyors of similar, more simple-minded fare, such as A Beautiful Mind. The problem is that audiences are so accustomed to a big emotional payoff at the end of stories such as this that the lack of one feels wrong, as though we’ve been cheated of our rightful reward after sitting through all the depressing stuff about homelessness and schizophrenia.

Ultimately, you don’t leave the cinema with a rueful but satisfying sense of just how disappointing life can be. You just feel disappointed.

To be fair to the makers of The Soloist, this is a true story and they evidently felt it would be improper to depart too far from the facts. Nevertheless, they have given themselves some creative latitude in their characterisation of Lopez, who is portrayed as a divorced dad, estranged from his only son. The strategy here is to try to give him the redemptive character arc that Ayers lacks, presenting him as being morally transformed by his relationship with the homeless man. But the film-makers lack the courage to see this through. By the end of the story Lopez doesn’t seem like a reformed character, more a do-gooder who recognises that there’s a limit to just how much good he can do.

Ultimately, the reason that The Soloist fails is because the writer and the director have been bamboozled by the seriousness of the subject matter. They don’t want to give the impression that homelessness can be wished away by the wave of a conductor’s baton and, consequently, they eschew all the usual Hollywood fairy dust. But you can’t expect audiences to endure all this grim social realism without tossing in a bit of magic at the end — not if you want your reach to extend beyond the arthouse. The Soloist reminded me of that old Woody Allen joke: Why are New Yorkers always so depressed? Because the light at the end of the tunnel is New Jersey.