The Soloist

The Soloist
Directed by Joe Wright
Runtime: 109 min.

The soloist isn’t about an L.A. Times writer who befriends a homeless
schizophrenic; it’s about the middle class feeling better about itself.
An artistic failure from conception, it’s British director Joe
“Steadicam”Wright’s torrent of self-righteousness equal to the
frequently referenced Hurricane Katrina.

Bad enough that
Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of reporter Steve Lopez lacks any trace
of ethnic specificity, so that the irony of his journalist character’s
ascension into middle-class conformity is erased.Worse is Jamie Foxx’s
Nathaniel Ayers, the former Juilliard student who roams L.A.’s streets
dressed in sequined jackets, wearing a stars-and-stripes top hat or
revealing flattened, processed hair with a Scott Joplin part in the
middle.

Foxx’s portrait of a lunatic is designed to match
Samuel L. Jackson’s similar one in The Caveman’s Valentine (2001) about
a black classical-music prodigy who went bonkers. The Soloist is even more reprehensible because it combines patronizing social fantasy with a distortion of real-life facts.

Downey
and Foxx don’t achieve oneworldly brotherhood; they diagram the gulf
between white imagination and black reality—rich folks’ politics and
underprivileged people’s desperation. Look at Foxx’s “dislocation”: His
inward focus isn’t the understanding of a weariness that Terrence
Howard shows in Fighting (“A hustler is by definition someone who can’t
win who wins.”); Foxx sentimentalizes Ayers’ deprivation. Pathos
becomes his point—not empathy, artistry, nor inspiration.

Social-political
reasons for Ayers’ crackup are hinted at (“Whiteness, whiteness,” he
wonders aloud when out of his element), then avoided. Fancy symbolism
of Ayers freaking out while a TV screen shows a crying baby is as terrible as any in Synecdoche, New York.Wright’s primary Hurricane Katrina metaphor is, as in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Sugar, meant to represent America’s (Bush’s) social failures. Louisiana’s
displaced victims are re-represented by the legions of actual, mostly
black, homeless people enlisted to surround Downey and Foxx’s folie a deux.

But
if Ayers’ problem is paranoid schizophrenia, why bring up racism,
poverty or the suggestion that he is gay—except to coddle liberal
sentiment? The only good scene is Catherine Keener briefly, drunkenly
accusing Downey of exploiting his subject.Wright avoids guilt with
high-tone classical music segments (including a Kubrick light show) and
his damned penchant for Steadicamming across L.A.’s netherworld—even a
smooth overhead pan of toilets! Steadicams cost money.This big-budget
version of The Caveman’s Valentine is a bleeding heart’s valentine.