The Soloist

IF YOU SET out to sketch a one-line pastiche of the sort of sentimental claptrap that studios lay before Oscar voters in late November, you could do worse than “journalist encourages homeless black bloke to play the cello”.

This is, indeed, the plot of Joe Wright's follow-up to Atonement, but, originally scheduled for that early-winter release date, it was later shuffled to a spring slot in the US and arrives here a good year after its completion. This does not bode well. If a film featuring a homeless bloke playing the cello isn't fit for the Oscar punters, then it's surely fit for nobody.

Well, here's the thing. The Soloistdoes turn out to be a failure, but it's a different sort of failure to the one we expected. It is markedly less sentimental than most films about homeless blokes playing the cello, but it's also a great deal more pretentious than such beasts tend to be. You have to give Wright credit for being his own man.

Based on a true story, the picture stars Robert Downey Jr (less twitchy than usual) as Steve Lopez, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, who, while searching for the latest outrage, encounters a homeless eccentric with a violin in the city's downtown district. It transpires that the man, Nathaniel Anthony Ayers (a committed Jamie Foxx), was once a student at Juilliard Music School in New York City. A gifted cello player, he developed schizophrenia as a student and dropped out for a life on the streets.

After incorporating Ayers’s story into a column, Lopez gets drawn into the unfortunate fellow’s life. He manages to wangle him a cello and arranges for him to play the instrument in a local homeless facility. Lopez then rents an apartment for his new friend and takes it on the chin when the musician pauses reluctantly at the threshold.

In the film’s defence (these are important points), it does not offer us a clichéd optimistic arc that leads from despair to hope to triumph. Nor does it present schizophrenia as a route to uncomplicated wisdom or a source of weird, unintentional humour. Foxx speaks in a continual, jagged monotone that only allows Lopez rare opportunities for lucid communication. Wright and his cast have, unlike too many film-makers, decided to treat Ayers’s condition as a real illness rather than a plot point.

The Soloistalso does a good job of communicating the character of downtown Los Angeles. Keeping to the pavement in a city where walking is a sign of derangement, Seamus McGarvey's camera shows up the stark contrasts between the gleam of the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the murk of homeless communities that squat eerily nearby.

Unfortunately, none of this fully distracts from the unhappy truth that The Soloistis a pretentious, unfocused mess with little confidence in the power of its themes and situations.

Take the scene where Ayers first plays the cello for Lopez. Before he’s got through the first two bars of the piece, Wright brings in a cascade of surging strings and swings the camera up to encounter pigeons striving for the heavens. Dragging out the old visual cliché that has birds representing the aspiration for freedom would be more forgivable if we were allowed to actually hear the tune that is animating their metaphor-powered ascent.

Wright’s restless desire to strive for showy effect after showy effect – when, for example, the cello arrives in the newsroom we follow it obsessively from lift to door – becomes increasingly oppressive and, by the time the camera has traced its final curlicue, the story (such as it is) has become lost in the bustle.

It's as if that hugely meretricious tracking shot from Atonement, in which Wright revealed the beach at Dunkirk without a single cut, had been allowed to take over the entire movie. It's impressive in its way, but it's not quite film-making.