Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice and Atonement marked him out as a British director who could hold his own in Hollywood.
And he does that here in his first American feature with this fictionalised version of how an LA Times columnist found an ex-Juilliard musician — once a classmate of Yo-Yo Ma — playing a clapped-out violin among the many homeless of the city.
The film is smartly, perhaps too smartly, made and tries hard not to go for the clichés of the impoverished genius genre. It has good performances from Robert Downey Jr as Steve Lopez, the columnist who eventually wrote a book about the schizophrenic musician he tried to help, and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Ayers, the lost soul himself.
Wright frames it with the music of Beethoven, which apparently obsessed Ayers, and it is used with some sensitivity even though a soaring bird in the skies of LA is used to illustrate it at one point. If this was unwise, and one doubts whether the real columnist was much like the fidgeting, nervously cynical Downey, the rest of the film keeps mostly to the truth of the storyline — which is that you can’t cure mental disorders that easily, however hard you try.
When, for instance, Ayers is persuaded to give a recital in front of an audience, he doesn’t play like an angel and get an ovation, as he might in your average Hollywood film, but leaves the stage, trembling, without playing a note. In the end, Lopez has to give up, realising that Ayers has possibly humanised him more than he has made a ‘‘normal’’ man out of Ayers.
Foxx, trailing his supermarket trolley full of possessions and never looking Lopez squarely in the eye, aptly suggests that the musician’s undoubted passion for music and his craft will remain however much his failure as a human being condemns him to living in doorways. And Wright adds to the film’s sense of actuality by peering almost obsessively at the detritus of humanity who inhabit the streets.
They are the real thing, recruited as extras. This alone makes it a brave film even if there is also something about it that doesn’t quite ring true. A little too smart for comfort, perhaps.
The Soloist
Cert: 12A
