Review: ‘The Soloist’

I honestly thought this movie was going to sweep the Academy Awards last year before the release date got pushed, but now it is very obvious for the change. Its not that ‘The Soloist’ is bad, its that the story drags on for what seems like days, tries to hard to be that Oscar contender and eventually falls short.

Robert Downey Jr plays Steve Lopez, a very popular journalist who writes for the LA Times, has an ex wife as a boss, and is desperately trying to come up with ideas for new column pieces. Along the way he “stumbles” across a man named Nathaniel Ayers(Jamie Foxx) while he is playing a 2 stringed violin on the streets of LA. Though communicating with him is difficult, Steve unveils that he at one point was a Julliard student which instantly sets off a light bulb for his next story.

He makes some phone calls to find out if he really was a student of Julliard and after he receives confirmation decides that he is the perfect subject for multiple write ups. When he is contacting members of Nathaniel’s family he finds out that he doesn’t have any formal training on the violin, but instead played the cello. After his first piece an elderly woman decides to donate her cello to Nathaniel since she can no longer play it due to arthritis. This is the first point in the story that Lopez realizes Nathaniel is more than just a story, he is someone that desperately needs his help.

Going in to this movie I thought that Jamie Foxx would have at least a nomination for Best Actor in the bag, and Downey Jr would be rolling away with a Best Supporting nod. After impatiently sitting through an hour a 50 minutes of this movie I walked out saying “if these guys get the nods, the movies we have on tap the rest of the year are going to suck”. Robert Downey Jr’s performance was great just like he usually is, but Jamie Foxx was reaching and its very obvious through most of the movie. I would have much rather seen a full blown story about Steve Lopez writing for the LA Times and dealing with his Ex Wife as his boss than to ever get involve the story about Nathaniel Ayers. Some movies really pull on your heartstrings, and then some just try to pull on them, this one definitely tried too hard.

Overall Rating: 2.5 out of 5