The Sololist starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx
I’ve never met Steve Lopez, but I feel like I know him. Lopez
writes a column for the L.A. Times and I’ve been reading it for the
better part of the six years, ever since I was in graduate school
and forced to read the newspaper cover to cover for weekly current
events quizzes. I would often save his column for last, as a treat
to reward myself for all the other articles I had to read
– and back then the L.A. Times cover to cover was a bit bulkier
than it is now.
The Sololist starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx
I’ve never met Steve Lopez, but I feel like I know him. Lopez writes a column for the L.A. Times and I’ve been reading it for the better part of the six years, ever since I was in graduate school and forced to read the newspaper cover to cover for weekly current events quizzes. I would often save his column for last, as a treat to reward myself for all the other articles I had to read – and back then the L.A. Times cover to cover was a bit bulkier than it is now.
Just before I graduated from journalism school and started my own career in news, Lopez published the first in a series of columns about a homeless man he ran into on the streets of downtown L.A. I’d been living just a couple miles from where Lopez first made the acquaintance of Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, a mentally ill man who had many years before studied at Julliard, and who still played a broken violin on the dirty streets of downtown L.A. more for himself than anyone else. Maybe it’s because I’d been living in a neighborhood where homeless people slept at bus stops near my local grocery store or outside the bars of my gated apartment complex, but I was amazed that Lopez had taken the time to see Nathaniel. It was a great lesson to me as I started my career that the best stories come from taking the time to get to know people.
After I graduated, I kept reading the columns online. When Lopez came out with a book entitled “The Soloist,” I read it, and passed it around my circle of family and friends. The book tells all the things Lopez couldn’t fit into a dozen columns that span a year’s time, and it deals with the struggle many newspapers are having as revenue – and staffs – shrink.
Director Joe Wright heard the story, too, and decided to make it into a movie. With the help of Susannah Grant, who wrote the screenplay, the two took pains to portray some parts of the story as accurately as possible. Wright actually filmed on skid row in Los Angeles, an area I never went into during my tenure living in Los Angeles. He also used actual residents in scenes filmed at Lamp, a homeless shelter on skid row that caters to the mentally ill.
Grant and Wright had quite a challenge in developing a story that requires quite a bit of back story. Instead of using narration by Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) – they limit that to snippets of him trying to work out the first sentence of his column – they used flashbacks to Ayers (Jamie Foxx) time as a young man first learning to play the cello through his time at Julliard when he first started to suffer symptoms of schizophrenia. The device works well, and the filmmakers are pretty true to Ayers’ story.
The place where they go wrong is in creating a different life to Lopez. The Lopez I know – at least from his columns and book – is happily married with a little girl, and two adult sons, and seems to genuinely think his job in journalism serves a good purpose. The Lopez in Wright’s movie comes across as a jaded columnist who is just in search of the next story to sell papers. He is divorced and estranged from his only child. He is so disconnected from any other human being, it takes awhile for viewers to even get that his editor is supposed to be his ex-wife (Catherine Keener). The point of creating this different persona is, perhaps, to make Lopez’ connection with Ayers that much more significant.
The movie just can’t fit in all the other stuff that was going on in the book while maintaining the relationship between the two men. In one climatic scene in the movie, Ayers runs off in a huff and Lopez hears of a homeless man who was beaten with a baseball bat. Lopez frantically searches to see if it was Ayers, and when it was not, he seems visibly relieved. Moviegoers may assume it was a bit of drama to add more suspense to the movie, but a homeless man was really beaten with a bat and left nearly dead on the streets of L.A. The real Steve Lopez tracked him down and told his story in the paper.
The movie itself is good and the acting is well done. Downey and Foxx take on the roles assigned them well. Foxx never seems to waiver from the confused musician he inhabits in the film. Downey takes the few humorous moments that require him to be soaked in human – and coyote – urine in stride. But for anyone who has read the columns or the books, the story misses just a bit.
