THE SOLOIST (Joe Wright). 116 minutes. Opens Friday (April 24). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NN
Remember how Atonement took Ian McEwan’s powerful, multi-layered novel and bent it into a pretentious reworking of The English Patient, all so director Joe Wright could pull off that spectacular four-minute shot of Dunkirk?
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Well, he’s at it again. The Soloist finds Wright taking a perfectly serviceable true story of the thorny relationship between a journalist and his mentally ill subject and beating it into a big, syrupy showcase for his own virtuosity.
Wright’s not working alone, either.
Jamie Foxx shuffles and mumbles to his heart’s content as Nathaniel Ayers, a gifted musician turned homeless schizophrenic. Robert Downey Jr. is L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez, who writes a series of columns about Ayers, only to realize that some people, and some problems, are more complicated than they seem.
There are a dozen ways to handle this material, and Wright’s taken the glossiest route. The Soloist is a film about Art and Poverty and Genius and all the other stuff that wins awards, all the while playing up its maker’s obvious bravery in tackling such weighty material.
Every shot is lit and framed to within an inch of its life, and the production design has spared no expense in creating the art-directed squalor of Ayers’s grubby world – which, when you think about it, is kind of obscene.
