Portrait of the Artist as a Homeless Man

Last night I watched a movie about musicians. I tend to avoid such movies. Usually filmmakers cannot capture the reality of making music; hammy close-ups of the actors' faces are supposed to convey the meaning of the music. Composers always write their best work in reaction to a tragic event in their lives. And so on.

But the film I saw last night was different.

The Soloist is the story of Nathaniel, a schizophrenic homeless man (Jamie Foxx) who plays the violin and the cello. In a familiar plot twist, reporter Steve (Robert Downey, Jr.) discovers him playing on the streets. Both characters are socially maladjusted: Nathaniel hears disturbing voices, and Steve has no real friends. The film could easily lapse into triteness here, with each character "learning valuable life lessons" from the other, etc. Fortunately, director Joe Wright avoids the easy solutions (maybe he had to, since he based his film on a true story?).

For example, the only thing that keeps Nathaniel going is his love of music, particularly Beethoven. Yet Steve is never fully able to understand Nathaniel's love of music; at some level, music remains closed to him. The filmmakers do not construct an epiphany for Steve. Similarly, Nathaniel remains schizophrenic and untreated throughout the film. We don't have the Victorian tea-party apotheosis for the misunderstood that we might have had (and did get, for instance, in The Elephant Man).

This is by no means a perfect film. The editing was strange - disorienting in its abrupt cuts from scene to scene, from present to past - and I'm not talking about the parts that depicted Nathaniel's schizophrenia. But there were also touches of genius in it. The scene by the homeless shelter, set to the funeral march from the Eroica, is one of them. Who would have thought that Beethoven's music could express the horrors of modern American poverty so well?

Finally, and I am thankful for this, the film is not a polemic for classical music, not a piece ofhigh-culture propaganda (like those ever help anybody). Nathaniel loves Beethoven, and Steve visits a dim bar where a country band does not impress. But music is valued here for its own sake, not because of any cultural or social values attached to one genre or another. Art is valuable as long it is pursued with integrity. As Nathaniel says in one of his lucid moments, "Beauty is art; music is beauty."