Joe Wright (2009)

The source material seems to be a case of life imitating formula pictures like this one.  Steve Lopez is a Los Angeles-based journalist who came across an African-American street musician, living rough.  The musician turned out to have a remarkable backstory:  Nathanael Ayers was a brilliantly promising cello student at Juilliard until schizophrenia destroyed his future musical career and sent him spiralling downwards.  According to this adaptation of Lopez’s book The Soloist, the journalist himself was driven and highly successful in his professional life, a selfish-bastard failure in his private life.  To get that point across clearly, Mary Weston, Lopez’s editor at the Los Angeles Times, is also his ex-wife.  Although Ayers’s physical circumstances improve (he moves into an apartment and, we’re told at the end, has stayed there – and continues to play a variety of instruments), his relationship with Lopez doesn’t cure his schizophrenic illness.  But in the last scene of the film we see a foursome enjoying a classical concert:  Ayers, the sister from whom he was long estranged, Lopez and Mary.  Unlike Ayers, who’s absorbed by what’s coming from the stage, Lopez and Mary seem rather uninterested in the music.  But they smile and kiss:  they’ve got together again because the experience of knowing Ayers has – as Lopez’s voiceover tells us – made the journalist into A Better Person.

The story looks to be processed from familiar ingredients:  Shine crossed with the generic tale of someone who breaks through racial-social barriers (in a flashback to his childhood, Ayers is told by his mother that his music gives him a ‘chance to escape’).  It’s evident from the start, however, that Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement) doesn’t have much idea of what he’s doing.  He cuts from shots of Los Angeles on its way to work to newspapers rolling noisily off the press, as if these provided some meaningful counterpoint.  The Soloist was due for release in 2008 but didn’t appear until the summer of this year.   I don’t know the reasons for the delay but I wondered as I watched if there’d been problems with excessive length and if some desperate cutting had taken place.  At one point, the succession of scenes is so ridiculous you feel that material must have been clumsily excised.  As part of the attempted rehabilitation of Ayers, he has lessons with a professional cellist, Graham Claydon.  The first lesson ends with Ayers throwing a wobbly.  In virtually the next scene, Claydon suggests to Lopez that Ayers play with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, of which Claydon is a member.  There’s nothing in between to explain why he thinks there’s any possibility of Ayers being able to cope with something so public and socially intimidating.   Wright then cuts straight to the orchestra and Ayers on stage – without showing Ayers’s reaction to Claydon’s suggestion or any sequences describing preparations for the big occasion.  The planned performance ends in tears, of course – with Ayers hearing voices as soon as he picks up his bow, breaking down, and storming off stage and out of the building.  Lopez makes telephone contact with Ayers’s sister early on (it’s from this conversation that he learns that Ayers, who’s playing a violin on the streets, was originally a cellist and at Juilliard).  The sister is evidently sympathetic and interested to hear news of her brother but then disappears from the story until she turns up for a heartwarming reunion with him at the business end of proceedings.  This sequential nonsense is only one aspect of the incoherence of The Soloist:  the narrative throughout is quite lacking in momentum.

At the end of the picture, a legend explains that there are 90,000 homeless people in Greater Los Angeles.   This late-in-the-day access of social conscience is a pat contradiction of the way Wright presents the homeless during the film itself.   It’s one thing to show their situation as a hell, another to use the ravaged, disfigured faces of some of the street dwellers to reinforce the hellish atmospherics.  I wasn’t sure whether these people were played by actors or by real homeless people.  If it’s the latter, The Soloist is more crudely manipulative than I realised.  If it’s the former, that’s certainly a tribute to Wright’s direction of the performers.  In either case, I don’t like the fact that, throughout the film, Ayers himself is shown as a cut above all the other crack addicts, winos and mentally ill people we see.  Except for one elderly woman, who rattles on in a way that leaves no doubt of her brain power (and whose naturalism exposes the falsity of Jamie Foxx as Ayers doing similar chattering routines), Wright and the screenwriter Susannah Grant never suggest for a moment that Ayers is one among many – that there are other vagrants whose lives have gone wrong and been comparably and tragically wasted.  When he performs in the centre for the homeless where much of the action takes place, Ayers’s music is transcendent and magically soothing to the other people there – Orpheus playing his lyre in the underworld – but he doesn’t play there again.  If Ayers can cope with a recital in the centre and the effects are so instantly therapeutic, it seems surprising that David Carter, the compassionate pragmatist who runs the place, doesn’t suggest a repeat performance.  Unless further sequences of this kind have been cut from the film, you can only conclude that Wright feels that the one moment of cheap uplift will suffice – that is until the cheesy feelgood sequence which accompanies the closing credits, when the main characters and the visitors to the centre all dance happily together.  It makes the celebratory finale of Slumdog Millionaire seem emotionally over-scrupulous.

Lopez’s relationship with Mary may be a true story but it’s rendered in a way that makes it a false one; the eventual humanising of Lopez is required yet still feels perfunctory.  The characterisation is thin anyway:  I had no idea what Lopez’s feelings about classical music were before he came upon Ayers – no sense of whether Lopez thinks Ayers is a remarkable interpreter of music that already means something to the journalist.  Allowing for the fact that they don’t have a great script to work with, neither of the leads is satisfying.  As Ayers, Jamie Foxx is uninteresting.  He never seems to get below the theatrical surface – or, at least, to express anything from below the surface – of the character.   Robert Downey Jr as Lopez holds the screen – and the picture together, which is no mean feat – but Downey isn’t the most connective of actors and, although it might seem that quality could be used to good effect in the role of the egocentric Lopez, the lack of connection between Downey and Foxx seems, given the scheme of the film, a fundamental shortcoming.  Catherine Keener is so instinctively responsive and emotionally fine-tuned that she does wonders with the role of Mary (although it’s frustrating to see her – again – in a role far beneath her gifts). When Lopez tells her about the excitement of getting to know Ayers and hearing him play and enthuses that ‘I’ve never in my life loved anything like this’, Keener reacts as if she’s been slapped in the face then instantly conceals her hurt.   Mary gets drunk at a dinner at which Lopez receives an award and, although the scene is crudely conceived, Keener stumbles on her words in a brilliantly natural way.   Nelsan Ellis is good as the centre worker Carter and Tom Hollander, although playing the cellist Claydon is a thankless task, does a creditable job.

8 October 2009