The Soloist

I had not looked forward to seeing The Soloist, precisely because a) the The Soloist's damn misleading trailers, playing since October (an almost guaranteed indicator of a turkey) sold it as feel-good sappy white journalist helps deranged black guy buddy- flick b) I dread Hollywood buddy-illness redemption weepers. However, like Sunshine Cleaning, The Soloist is not what its trailers represent itself to be: it's a story of friendship, Steve Lopez, a Los Angeles newspaper columnist, writing about and then befriending Nathaniel Ayers, a mentally disturbed homeless guy.

Walking as I do about Montreal, homeless people now seem everywhere. Watching The Soloist, I kept being reminded of cynical Bill Murray in Groundhog Day - unable to save a homeless guy - forced to accept things as they are. And like Bill Murray, I think there must be answers to this scourge yet I have no idea what is those answers should be, and fear that whatever is done, will never be enough. If you can't convince most of them they're sick, let alone steer them into public housing, then what?

Yet, I'm unwilling to let go, each time confronted by my own massive confused disarray. Freezing, rotting, they don't seem romantic nor creative to me. They seem scary, provoking my fear of random psychotic violence. And I'm afraid to take responsibility for my own thoughts. I fear their great unknown, so I arc around or away from them on my way into Second Cup. I cross Sherbrooke to avoid them on my way to McGill.

I'll be fascinated to hear your responses to this movie. After watching The Soloist, we'll have lots to talk about.

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The Soloist has had several fascinating incarnations; first it was a Los Angeles Times column, then a series of columns; then a book. Before it came out as a movie, it was also an item on CBS' 60 Minutes.

....Here are links to all of them: a Hansel and Gretel Reese's Pieces trail of provenance back to the movie's creative genesis. Each present a different perspective on this extraordinary friendship, and are all worth sampling before screening the movie:

• Steve Lopez's original LA Times columns. (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez28-2008dec28,0,2059096.column): [Mr. Ayers] once told me he preferred experiencing life to seeing it reflected in a mirror. ... After reading the book, though, he thanked me. He said it wasn't easy to read, but he felt that he needed to. As for the movie, he said he had no desire to see it, in part because the very thought of two-dimensional images on a screen is spooky to him. Lopez controled the contents of both his column and his book. With the movie, Lopez lost control over the portrayal of both Nathaniel Ayers and himself.

• A David Carr NYT article (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/movies/19carr.html?emc=eta1) is a basic backgrounder, introducing us to Lopez, the journalist, the actors and the filmmakers charged with mutating Lopez' collection of non-fiction newspaper articles into a coherent movie.

• Then, there's a quite remarkable 60 Minutes documentary item on the Lopez-Ayers friendship that evolved between these two men. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/22/60minutes/main4882450.shtml. You'll meet the real Steve Lopez and the real Nathaniel Ayres on whom the movie is based: both much older than their dopplegangers, Rob't Downey and Jamie Foxx. So what!

• Stephanie Zacherek, movie critic for Salon (http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2009/04/24/soloist/index.html,) makes a telling accusatory point: how the movie's craftily edited trailers utterly and deliberately misled the audience into believing:

  ...the movie is one of those uplifting friendship stories guaranteed to elicit one or two obligatory tears before sending everybody home feeling good. That's what the guys who edited that trailer want you to think: Movie advertising is never about nuance, but movies often are. She got that right.

Creative Liberties

We've discussed movie makers creative liberties in the past: how movies vary from perceived reality.The movie version of The Soloist has many variances, which clearly irritate several in-the-know cognoscenti, especially movie reviewers. For example, the movie Steve Lopez is not divorced in real life, his former wife is not his editor

Cinephiles know my view on carping over creative liberties: It's a movie. Get over it!!!!

60 - 90,000 Destitute Angelenos

More distressing however....in the back of almost every Soloist skidrow shot (and often in the foreground) is this community of real homeless - 60 - 90,000 destitute, desolate souls loitering just behind the Disney/Frank Gehry splendid concert hall. In the 60 Minutes piece, Casey Horan, who runs an agency providing shelter for the mentally ill, notes more homeless reside in LA than San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, New York and Seattle combined. Whew!

Here, movie-making and reality get skewed, overlapping, wierder than any reinvented columns mutated into scripts. As in Che, Gomorra and Sin Nombre, Soloist on camera mean streets are populated with real marginalized homeless. So, in front of the camera is an actor , Jamie Foxx playing a character whose fragile hold on reality is never a sure thing. Filling in the background are the genuine articles. We the audience, sitting in air-conditioned comfort, are witnessing chaos; we are able to determine that Robert Downey Jr. is certainly not Steve Lopez. But we're utterly incapable of determining whether that weird guy, twirling in front of the Jamie Foxx, is nuts or just acting.