The Soloist

You could watch Robert Downey Jr clean a toi­let with a tooth­brush for two hours and be fas­ci­nat­ed. His per­son­al his­to­ry, com­bined with his on-screen chem­istry, means that how­ev­er much urine he ends up coat­ed in – and here there’s both his own and a coyote’s – he can do lit­tle wrong. It’s true again in The Soloist. It’s only the film’s con­tex­tu­al­i­sa­tion that peri­od­i­cal­ly stinks.

Direc­tor Joe Wright, so impres­sive and tight with Pride and Prej­u­dice and Atone­ment, appears to have fall­en foul of the stu­dio trap. Giv­en a big bud­get and US co-pro­duc­tion, he’s over­stretched, los­ing the reins on the film with some tru­ly dire, lit­er­al, over­bear­ing, metaphor­i­cal moments: pigeons fly­ing, music soar­ing, an avant-garde flick­er film and a papi­er-mâché globe.

Such flaws make you wish – hard – that you could machete The Soloist from a ​‘good’ film into a ​‘great’ one, as there is much of mer­it here. This is a superbly per­formed exam­i­na­tion of two lone­ly men both exist­ing in a Pla­ton­ic nether world. One, Steve Lopez (Downey Jr), is an LA Times jour­nal­ist – alone, dys­func­tion­al, divorced. The oth­er, Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), is a hobo; schiz­o­phrenic, social­ly dis­abled and, as Steve dis­cov­ers, a genius cel­list liv­ing out­side social parameters.

As Steve attempts to nur­ture Nathaniel’s tal­ent and shunt him into shel­tered hous­ing, the film pro­vides a poignant exam­ple of mid­dle-class patron­age as an avoid­ance of self-exam­i­na­tion. It’s won­der­ful to realise that Nathaniel’s life is a hard-learned means of self-med­ica­tion that enables him to sur­vive men­tal ill­ness; where­as it is Steve who can­not resolve his failed rela­tion­ship with Cather­ine Keener’s Mary (Keen­er and Downey Jr forge a mov­ing slice of mod­ern mar­riage on the film’s fringe).

As pow­er­ful and as sub­tle is the knowl­edge that real-life occu­pants of Down­town LA’s home­less Lamp Com­mu­ni­ty starred in the film. The point isn’t laboured, but it’s made evi­dent in the end cred­its and is enough to reduce you to tears.

But on leav­ing, one can­not feel unam­bigu­ous. Wright’s major mis­take is the flash­back to Nathaniel’s back­ground. Mun­dane, TV movie sim­plis­tic and, iron­i­cal­ly, very mid­dle-class patro­n­is­ing, it caus­es the film’s tra­jec­to­ry to go limp. It’s as if Wright has attempt­ed to insert the entire­ty of Ben­jamin But­ton into proceedings.

This is deeply frus­trat­ing as there is such dynamism here – in per­for­mance; in Wright’s depic­tion of LA as some­thing akin to Dante’s Infer­no; and in his use of the cel­lo as a human voice. Why he didn’t edit the film back to Downey Jr’s point-of-view is a mys­tery. Or per­haps a com­pro­mise he was forced to make. If that’s the case, he’d do bet­ter to fly solo again in future.