The Soloist is one interesting film. I am in love with Joe Wright’s style of directing and believe he may be one of the great directors at work today with the likes of Tom Hooper, Kenneth Branagh, Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, and Peter Weir. He has a way with the camera, with his actors, with the script, with the music, and with the scenery. The Soloist doesn’t do this man justice. It’s sad to say that The Soloist could have been better in the hands of a different director.
Mr. Wright knows how to position his cameras. He knows what to do with it in every scene. He knows what to show and what not to show. And he knows what way to light his sets. In The Soloist, he doesn’t. He seems confused and tries to mimic what he did with his two previous British art films in an American bromance-drama film set in 2003. Mr. Wright uses clique camera angles and recopies what he did previously but it doesn’t work. Close-ups in a film like Atonement is fantastic if you have good actors and power behind it, but when you are doing it to show craziness, all the audience feels is awkwardness. And there is even a scene where Nathaniel (Foxx) is listening to a rehearsal in Disney Concert Hall and instead od watching him listening to the music or watching the orchestra (which would have been better) we see these weird Fantasia-like color and wave like patterns popping onto the screen.
That being said, I also felt the performances were too weak for a film of this nature. Jamie Foxx is like a cookie cutter, simply redoing what other great actors have done with being schizophrenic and doesn’t try and be his own. The close-ups of the camera didn’t help, getting right up into his face, however, that still doesn’t relinquish the fact that there is nothing genuine or unique in his role. The same in Robert Downey Jr. Normally great, Downey never feels emotionally invested. The audience relies too much on the failed camera work to speed up the pacing. Yelling out to the camera and the world won’t make an audience feel for the character’s complexity, Mr. Downey. And talking really quickly and randomly won’t make the audience feel you are mentally ill, Mr. Foxx.
Touching more on that, the script didn’t even do the insanity justice. Like I said before, talking rapidly won’t make the viewers believe he is insane, or at least they won’t feel fully invested in the character, which I know I wasn’t. And not only did they do that, they also added into Nathaniel’s character voices that he hears. Yes, schizophrenics hear voices or see people that aren’t there. The viewers don’t need to hear them. If that’s the only time we really get into the mind of the character is when he starts to hear voices, then the filmmakers just destroyed the nature of the character. I also don’t like the flashbacks. The film shouldn’t follow both Steve Lopez (Robert) and Nathaniel. It should follow one or the other, even if the book followed both. It gets too much and I felt I was being split apart. The movie seemed to follow Lopez and then randomly there is a flashback to Nathaniel’s life and those flashbacks are the only times we actually see Nathaniel. Also, the mumbling of Robert is too much. I couldn’t hear a word of his column so I really had to read subtitles in the film.
Then there is the music. Dario Marianelli composed both of Wright’s previous films. However, there wasn’t much in the way of music in this film. I do not like a film about music to only contain what previous men have composed. There is absolutely nothing in this film that has come through Dario’s mind and all he does is use what Bach and Beethoven composed to fill the film. The movie incorporates these two men’s work, but it shouldn’t be all that is there. Like in Black Swan, the movie is about Swan Lake, but there is newly composed music that adapts itself to Swan Lake and doesn’t rehash the Swan Lake music over and over again. That’s what the film should have done, adapt and use to establish an emotional foothold in our ears.
Lastly, in all of Joe Wright’s films, he incorporates the landscape and scenery into his sets. In England and in France where his past two films take place, he does this flawlessly, but in The Soloist he tries too hard again. Los Angeles is not a gorgeous landscape and not a rich and majestic city. I went there for Spring Break, I know what the streets are like. I’m not sure what Mr. Wright’s intentions were, but it seemed to me that somehow he tries to find beauty in the trash of Skid Row. He reuses these epic sweeping pan shots of the city and somehow it doesn’t really work. In a way it is unique and different and what I wanted to see, but in a way it still didn’t work. It seemed too far-fetched for me to get my heart and my mind into a movie with these kinds of pan shots of the city.
The Soloist is far from good. It is disappointing for me to say that one of my favorite directors has such a trashy film, but it is the truth. I couldn’t sympathize for these characters. All that I am trying to get at is that the film could have been so much more in different hands. Not better hands necessarily, because Mr. Wright still is amazing in my opinion.
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