Soloist, The (DVD)

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"The Soloist" did only modest business in theaters, barely recouping half its budget, which is surprising considering the quality of its director, its stars, and its real-life story. The director of this 2009 release, Joe Wright, was fresh off the financial successes of "Atonement" and "Pride and Prejudice," a pair of romances that far exceeded what one might normally expect of such genre material. Star Jamie Foxx was fresh off successes in "Ray" and "Collateral" and co-star Robert Downey, Jr. was fresh off successes in "Iron Man" and "Tropic Thunder." The public didn't seem to care. Apparently, they wanted more substance to the story.

Screenwriter Susannah Grant based her "Soloist" script on a book by Steve Lopez, a "Los Angeles Times" columnist who befriended a gifted, middle-aged, homeless, mentally ill street musician, Nathaniel Ayers, finding his life story so compelling he developed it into a series of articles and the book. If you saw the "60 Minutes" segment on the two men and their remarkable relationship, you have a pretty good idea what the movie is about. Which brings up perhaps the movie's biggest failing: While it does a terrific job recreating the outward traits of the two men, the film never actually brings them to life or makes their circumstance as meaningful to the viewer as they could be.

Jaimie Foxx plays Ayers, a black man who has lived and breathed classical music all his life, but whose psychological problems caused him to drop out of Juilliard in his second year, some three decades earlier. In his lucid moments, Ayers is charming and considerate; in his schizophrenic moments, he's in another world. Robert Downey, Jr. plays Lopez and also narrates the film. Both actors are superb and play well off one another, although it is primarily Lopez's story. Hey, he wrote the book; give him credit.

The film attempts to do several things, achieving them only superficially in its 116 minutes running time. Certainly, it attempts first and foremost to show us the friendship of the two men. Unfortunately, it never makes it clear until the very end that the two men are, indeed, friends. There is always some doubt about the clarity of Ayers's thinking, and there is, at least in the beginning, the question of whether Lopez is truly connecting with Ayers on a personal basis or whether he is exploiting him for sake of a good news story. By the end of the film we see that the two men have become fast and respectful friends, but those lingering doubts throughout most of the film tend to cloud our appreciation of Lopez's motives. Then, too, the film attempts to address the issue of homelessness in L.A., where thousands of people wander aimlessly, hoping to find shelter and a comforting hand. Yet the print and film media have already addressed this issue numerous times, and simply showing us homeless, desperate people isn't quite enough to move us to any kind of action.

To their credit, the filmmakers avoid romanticizing, glamorizing, or exaggerating Ayers or Lopez, instead presenting them as living, breathing, fallible human beings. However, this only makes the film more prosaic and helps further to anchor it down in the commonplace. Neither of the men comes off as particularly charismatic or worthy of our attention, the film tending to present them as mere curiosities.

Oh, it's true there are instances when director Wright does provide scenes of soaring lyricism, as when Ayers takes off with his cello on various flights of fancy; there are a couple of illuminating flashbacks to Ayers's youth and his struggles growing up in a tough neighborhood; and there's a magic moment when Lopez arranges for the two of them to attend a rehearsal of the L.A. Philharmonic, the look on Ayers's face priceless. But such occasions are few, and most of the time "The Soloist" seems bogged down in mere storytelling.