Blu-Ray Review: ‘The Soloist’ Wastes Powerful Story, Great Actors

CHICAGO – Stars Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. do absolutely nothing wrong in Joe Wright’s “The Soloist,” now on Blu-Ray and DVD, and there’s more than enough inherent power in the story of a musical genius lost to mental illness and the horrible way we treat the homeless in this country for a quality drama, but this cinematic solo misses too many notes to have the impact that it should have with this much talent involved.

Blu-Ray Rating: 3.0/5.0

The cast & crew list for “The Soloist” is remarkable enough that the film almost opened the AFI Film Festival last year based on pedigree alone. Then someone saw the movie and Joe Wright’s third drama (after “Pride & Prejudice” and “Atonement”) was pushed from Oscar season to April. We should have known something was wrong then.

The Soloist was released on Blu-Ray on August 4th, 2009.
Photo credit: Paramount

But back to that list of cast and crew that had most awards season pundits drooling - Oscar nominee Robert Downey Jr., Oscar winner Jamie Foxx, Oscar nominee Catherine Keener, director Joe Wright (who helmed the Best Picture-nominated “Atonement), Oscar-nominated writer Susannah Grant (“Erin Brockovich”), and a crew of some of the most talented people in Hollywood (composer Dario Marianelli, cinematography Seamus McGarvey, and more).

The Soloist was released on Blu-Ray on August 4th, 2009. Photo credit: Paramount

Downey Jr. stars in “The Soloist” as LA Times journalist Steve Lopez, a reporter who stumbled across the story of his life when he heard a homeless man playing a two-string violin in a Los Angeles park. The man turned out to be Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a former Juilliard student whose pschizophrenia sent him all the way to skid row. Lopez wrote a series of stories about Ayers that touched an emotional chord with his readers, giving a face to the homeless problem in the city of angels.

Nathaniel Ayers had a gift. He also had a curse. His gift allowed him to both hear and play music in ways that most of us will never understand. His curse forced him to hear voices and have hallucinations that made living on the street his only option.

There is so much dramatic potential in the life of Nathaniel Ayers that it’s easy to see why a screenwriter thought it would make an interesting film. And it could have if Joe Wright and Susannah Grant had trusted Jamie Foxx to deliver what he’s clearly capable of delivering. The only way that “The Soloist” works is as realism, but Grant and Wright clutter the portrayal of Ayers by audibly portraying the voices that Ayers reportedly heard and trying to visually represent the way that he heard music. Big mistakes. When you have an actor as talented as Foxx, you should trust him to deliver the complexities of a character like Ayers without being so on-the-nose that we actually hear his auditory hallucinations. It takes the viewer out of the film and reminds them that they’re watching a movie.

Foxx, Downey, Keener, and the production values of “The Soloist” warrant a rental, but, ultimately, this is just a decent movie that should have been great.

Except for a slightly mediocre audio track when one considers the subject matter of the film, the Paramount Blu-Ray release for “The Soloist” delivers exactly what renters or buyers would expect from it.

The film is presented in 1080p High Definition and the transfer is pretty flawless but the English 5.1 Dolby TrueHD track is a bit average for a film about the passion of music.

The special features are well-divided between the true story of Lopez and Ayers and the fictional recounting of it. Lopez, Ayers, Downey, Foxx, Wright, and more are included on the featurettes, the most detailed of which is called “An Unlikely Friendship: Making The Soloist”. Deleted scenes and a commentary by Wright round out a quality package for an interesting film that just misses the power of its true story.

By BRIAN TALLERICO Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com