Los Angeles Times
writer Steve Lopez recorded his
encounters with Nathaniel Ayers, a talented and once-promising musician who dropped out of the fabled Juilliard school at 19, crippled by appalling mental illness. His columns made a book, which I have not read, though the title,
The Soloist: A Lost Dream
,
an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music
makes me fear the worst. And the film version shows just how wrong it could go.
To use a musical metaphor, it hits more wrong notes than right ones and manages the considerable feat of both inflating and trivialising its story: the passages charting the onset of Ayers' illness have a tacky B-grade quality to them and his present-day ravings are sanitised hokum.
The real Ayers (check the
60 Minutes
interview online) will compare a passage in a Chopin piano concerto to "the sound of a child's heart" or insert into a rant about Beethoven the observation that "my mother is just as good as the Statue of Liberty, forever".
This is a character beyond the reach of many things, including characterisation. And Foxx's incarnation of him, like Geoffrey Rush's David Helfgott in
Shine
, is never more than an assemblage of symptoms.
So, fatally, it becomes a film about a journalist and there's something deeply tasteless about that. The real Lopez probably knew it was never about him but the one in the film never gets that at all. The resolution, such as it is, can only occur when Ayers apologises for losing his cool - yet he's the one who's sick.
The film is not without its moments of bravura. Wright, the director of
Atonement
, conjures up scenes reminiscent of that film's fabulous beach sequence and finds an eerie beauty in downtown LA. And the music (mainly cello works of Bach and Beethoven) is sublime. But this is a film whose makers seem to have missed the point of their own story.
Peter Calder
Cast:
Robert Downey Jr, Jamie Foxx
Director:
Joe Wright
Running time:
118 mins
Rating:
M (offensive language)
