Column:

'Soloist' a confused mess

Keeping focus could have saved this movie.

By Dan Moore

Published April 30, 2009

"The Soloist" is a lot of mess for not a lot of movie. Its only idea for getting through the sloppiness and the imprecision of newsgathering and psychosis is to be sloppy and imprecise. Its only conception of avoiding tidy biopic resolution is to avoid any resolution at all. Straddling the line between Oscar-bait and indie honesty, it struggles to achieve either one with any satisfaction.

That it avoids out-and-out Oscar-baiting is itself a minor triumph -- the number of "Academy moments" in the synopsis alone is startling. Count along with me: based on a true story (1), "The Soloist" is the story of a noble reporter (2) named Steve Lopez, played by Robert Downey Jr. (3), who sees a homeless (4) African-American (5) classical musician (6), Nathaniel Ayers, played by serial over-actor Jamie Foxx (7), playing a violin on the streets. Struggling with an indifferent medical system (8), the musician's mysterious, flashback-y past (9) in the boomer-pivotal 70s (10), and his own reluctance to commit (11), exemplified in his failed marriage (12), the reporter must find something in his own heart that allows him to understand the musician. In the end, has the reporter helped the musician, or has the musician helped him (13)?

The movie's struggle with form has allowed it to avoid that admittedly Oscar-filled fate. Without a famous story to latch onto, the film lacks the biopic genre's clockwork structure, in which we see people in various stages of period dress saying, with awed looks on their faces, "this (name of biopic subject) -- he could really be something! The best damned (occupation) I've ever seen!"

Instead, the movie is patterned vaguely along Steve Lopez's interactions with Ayers, starting with Lopez's writers' block and a minor nod at newspaper layoffs, and ending with their reluctant, uncertain friendship after a series of newspaper articles make Ayers and Lopez uncomfortable public figures. The pattern's looseness is sometimes a virtue -- we understand Lopez's role on the newspaper better because we can follow him trying to get absurd, folksy stories, like the possible uses of coyote urine, while he chases Ayers down.

But the movie bogs down in a number of nearly related subplots. Is it, or should it be, about Lopez the reporter and Lopez the friend? Should it be a story of Ayers' mental breakdown and tentative redemption, his need to be cared for and also independent? Is it a story about writing stories about someone who doesn't know he's headline news? All these elements slip in and out of the movie as unfulfilling images, when just one of them would have made a fine movie.

Like so many biopics before it, "The Soloist" is finally betrayed by its own real-ness. The fetishization of the true story makes it difficult to compress the narrative, to select the important detail, to know the story one is telling, but those acts are as necessary here, in nonfiction, as they are in fiction.