The Soloist

Man is a social creature. No matter what the company he keeps, he invariably wants to exist in company.

He – or she, for that matter – also tends to think of himself before others, which is called greed and has led over the centuries to massive differences between the most impoverished and the most wealthy of humanity. There's a line in ITV's recent Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff says he made his fortune by taking advantage of other men's weaknesses – and it's a sentiment that rings very true for all fortunes made on the back of some exploited person.

Exploitation is a big theme hanging over true-story The Soloist. It's the latest film about a gifted person in poverty (and with mental health issues on this occasion), who meets someone that sees his talent and wants to help him. That would be sweet, if it weren't for the fact that the person helping him is reporter for the LA Times – Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) – who features this homeless, schizophrenic prodigy of a musician in his newspaper column and picks up a journalism award for it. As he picks up his award, his ex-wife jokes that he's exploiting this man – Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) – and tells him he should write a book as well as the column. She neglects to mention the film that would be adapted from that book.

Meanwhile, Ayers is slumming it with the 90,000 homeless people of Los Angeles. He's been homeless since running away from the college course that allowed him to play cello in an orchestra, which went downhill once he started hearing voices. Now he's down-sized and plays his two-stringed violin in the streets. He's the soloist of the title, but this story belongs to Lopez. He's the reporter that starts off telling his readers about Ayers, but then gets more involved until he's writing about the ways that he's changing Ayers' life – whether Ayers likes it or not.

While such philanthropy is admirable, it seems misplaced, or perhaps misjudged. Lopez directs his efforts at one man, who only appreciates it some of the time. He's a man uncomfortable indoors, a man who is happiest listening to the sounds of Beethoven's string compositions swelling through the city air and mingling with the sounds of the freeway traffic and building work. Lopez's intrusive 'help' sees him moved to an apartment, and away from the sounds of people that had surrounded him. While it seems an improvement on the crowded slum (crowded mostly with black and mentally handicapped people, the oft-ignored side of America), Ayers has chosen that slum over the apartment he used to have.

It seems the American Dream in which everyone is free to do as s/he pleases has gone sour, as Lopez imposes his help on Ayers while using his story to win awards (and presumably Brownie points at the local philanthropists' club), and a cello teacher tries to convert the prodigy to God.