I Am Soloist

The Soloist (2009)

Rating ... D (14)

Joe Wright has a gift. The Soloist is practically an I Am Sam retread minus the maudlin, but that doesn't appear to deter Wright from trying to ingest coal and shit diamonds - or more specifically, what qualifies as a diamond in the eyes of the typical Academy voter. While his previous effort Atonement reeked of cinematic excess primarily off the back of a lone, unbroken take of the Dunkirk beachfront (dig this shot!), with The Soloist he's cranked up the wank-off preening, presumably in compensation for the story's slightness; like a true Academy contender, Wright's handiwork marries flimsy conceits with flamboyant filmmaking, and his fervent attempts to spit-shine the finished product into awardsy enticement could scarcely have been more pronounced.

Jamie Foxx receives the Oscar baton as the naturally meretricious Nathaniel Ayers, a schizophrenic indigent and musician (but more appropriately, eccentricity on display) with an education from Juliard and a conspicuously pitiful two-stringed violin. Like all homeless people, he's simply a down-on-his-luck savant unfairly maligned out of executing that for which he possesses a natural aptitude by circumstance and thus deserving of a financial break, which The Soloist sees fit to dole out in the sum of $50 million. (Ostensibly this actually happened, seeing that the film is based on a true story; while most movies that fall under this header enjoy touting their status, just so we're clear on how inherently important they are, Wright must have forgotten to flaunt his credentials because his hands are full flaunting his cinematography.) The Soloist lauds this grant as a humanitarian triumph to which the vagrant community was entitled and unjustly deprived, and Wright's directing takes the conceit one nauseating step further by montaging the lord's prayer - by this point the most hackneyed method of expressing religious devotion - over a soup kitchen distributing meals to the homeless ("give us this day our daily bread"), thereby likening fruitless charity to spiritual fulfillment. The notion is further verified in Foxx's only award-baiting outburst where he denounces a religious music teacher and declares Robert Downey Jr.'s journalist and friend Steve Lopez to be his God, which later parlays into the after-school special supposition that mentally unstable don't need medication ... they need love! (I Am Sam's similarly revolting take: "Just because he doesn't have the capacity to THINK doesn't mean he doesn't have the capacity to LOVE!")

When The Soloist isn't touring funny farms to provide audiences with superfluous examples of its pointlessly scrutinzed portrayal of schizophrenia, director Joe Wright allows his exuberant flourishes to take center stage. His first time at bat resorts to overblown visual metaphor where Ayers's playing induces the camera to follow a pair of birds in flight to various levels of atmospheric stratification. He later replays the exact same idea when Ayers visualizes an orchestra's rendition of Beethoven's 3rd as a colorform screensaver. (His music's inspirational and sublime and all, geddit?) Unfortunately, Wright's graphical aggrandizing is an inadequate mask for his storytelling ineptitude, as The Soloist - like so many other inelegant 2009 flicks, it seems, with Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, Terminator: Salvation, He's Just Not That Into You - resorts to lazy voiceover narration to conclude, essentially Wright force-feeding the audience the point of this movie and also why I made this movie, the end. True to its title's implications of baseless cinematic grandstanding, The Soloist is like a gratuitous guitar solo that just won't end.