FilmFemme

If you’ve been to the movies in the past year, I can almost guarantee that you saw this trailer at least once. I happened to see it about 12 times (I wish I were exaggerating) and it got to the point where if I heard Jamie Foxx say “I’ve had a few setbacks” and cue the sad cello chord one more time I was seriously going to flip.  But, The Soloist was finally released and after indulging in The Informers (RIP Brad Renfro) and Earth (RIP Elephant) I went to see it.  And it sucked.  I’m going to go out on a limb and guess this is why the release date was pushed back a thousand times and the studio decided not to use it as the Oscar bait that it was so clearly intended to be.

Robert Downey, Jr. plays LATimes columnist Steve Lopez (Lopez? really?), an immature and self-involved guy who is divorced from his editor wife (Catherine Keener) and was recently in a sort of heinous bike crash.  Still scraped and bruised, he meets Nathanial Ayers (Jamie Foxx) in downtown LA, playing the violin.  He finds out that Nathanial studied at Julliard and makes it his mission to help him through a series of front page columns and, you know, hanging out.  Some heavy handed flashbacks provide us with Nathanial’s backstory — turns out the talented musician is schizophrenic and had a mental break down at Julliard, then ran away from home many years before due to his persecutory delusions. 

On the surface, this movie has all the elements of a tear/Academy-jerking drama: two powerhouse stars (who already have Oscars), based on a true story, deals with mental illness and the triumph of the fucking human spirit.  The problem is that it is all on the surface.  Sure, Foxx and Downey give strong performances, they’re good actors.  Robert Downey, Jr. could give a good performance as a bowl of shredded wheat (don’t steal that idea, I’m going to pitch it to Disney/Pixar).  But the whole story is so superficial.  The flashbacks are boring and obvious.  The snippets of Lopez’s failed relationship, including 2 or 3 instances where his ex begs him to call their son with no payoff, are flat and not compelling.  The scene where the unlikely friends go to see the LA Philharmonic at Disney Hall and Nathanial is so swept away by the music that the screen goes black and starts display flashes of color that seriously, literally, look exacty like my MacBook’s default screensaver is just…lame.  I never felt compelled to care about what happens to Nathanial or Steve.  Oh, are they going to learn lessons from each other?  Oh, weird.  Are they both going to be better people for having met?  Oh, wow, that’s great.  Is anything going to explode?  Am I going to care at all?  Oh, yeah, no.  The Soloist is the definition of formulaic and boring.  I will say with enthusiasm that your time is better spent listening to Jamie Foxx’s album.  Have you heard that song “Blame it on the A A A A A Alcohol”?  It’s way more compelling than this movie!

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