Jamie Foxx's embodiment of Ayers, a schizophrenic whose only home is his music, is indelible. When he plays the cello or listens to Beethoven, his lined forehead resembles a musical staff, and his onyx eyes dance like notes. Ditto Robert Downey Jr.'s portrait of Lopez, an Inquirer alum trying to land the big one for his next Los Angeles Times column. His urgent need to solve the problem, to diagnose and cure Ayers, brings the viewer into the mind and conscience of a journalist.
The conceit, of course, is that ultimately, the subject reels in the scribe. Susannah Grant's screenplay compresses the events in the book without compromising its complexity. This bracing story shows how Ayers experiences the challenges of homelessness and mental illness and how Lopez applies the balms of friendship and music. Bravely for a studio movie, it never suggests that the balm, even in exalted doses of Beethoven, can be a cure.
Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement), specialist in translating books to screen, is equally capable of subtlety and self-consciousness, sometimes within the same scene.
But the tone of The Soloist is wildly uneven. Though unsparing and unsentimental when framing the principals, Wright is hyperbolic when depicting the agitation of the mentally ill and the soothing rapture of music.
In his mostly subdued film Wright shows the maw of hell that is L.A.'s Skid Row, filming the chaos in frenzied reds and browns that approximate a Hieronymus Bosch inferno. I applaud the director for hiring actual denizens of Skid Row to play themselves, but artistically it's a mistake for professionals and nonprofessionals to share the screen.
For one thing, mixing pros with civilians has the unfortunate effect of making the actors look like impostors. For another, it inadvertently treats the denizens of Skid Row as human props.
