The Soloist

These are my notes for the film we screened last night. It was the last film of the season and although it was good we had a pretty small audience. next year we plan to end the season before Easter.

The Soloist

USA 2009 (117 minutes)
Director: Joe Wright
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Robert Downey Jr. and Catherine Keener

Awards and Nominations
Four nominations including Best Actor nominations for both Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.

While at the Juillard School Nathaniel Ayers (Foxx) developed schizophrenia and after becoming homeless is reduced to playing a two-stringed violin on the streets of downtown Los Angeles. Steve Lopez (Downey) is a journalist, and after meeting Ayers he decides to write a column about him and his homelessness. The column is a great success, and as Lopez continues both to write about Ayers and to help him he is forced to grapple with the complex issues of the thousands of mentally ill who live on the streets of Los Angeles.

With its subject matter the film seems to be a close companion to Shine (1996), which was based on the life of the pianist David Helfgott who spent years in institutions after a mental breakdown. However Philip French, somewhat idiosyncratically, links it to Marley & Me (2008) and Julia & Julia (2009) in that all three films started as newspaper columns which their authors then turned into books.

The film is based on a true story that Steve Lopez told in a series of columns that eventually became a book called The Soloist. Since the success of the book Lopez has maintained a relationship with Ayers and has become his mentor. But Lopez always saw Ayers as more than one individual with a story to tell:

“I was told early on that this was a rare opportunity to humanise thousands like him. This story took me into a whole world, a world so close... to City Hall. Without him, without the evolving drama of his life, nobody would have cared about the public policy of it.”

As his relationship with Ayers continued Lopez became both an expert and an advocate for mental health and homeless issues and speaks regularly on the lecture circuit.

After beginning his career in television Joe Wright made his name in the cinema with an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (2005) which won him a BAFTA for Most Promising Newcomer and which starred Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennett. He worked with Knightley again on the multi-Oscar nominated Atonement (2007). The Soloist marked a clear change of direction and helped Wright escape from being seen as a director of prestige adaptations of literary classics. His current project is another change of direction: Hanna is a story about a teenage assassin from Easter Europe who escapes from her background when a French family take her in.