Movie Review: The Soloist

The movie The Soloist starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx is based on the book with the same title written by Steve Lopez. The book chronicles Steve Lopez’s friendship with a homeless schizophrenic named Nathaniel Ayers. In the movie, Robert Downey Jr. portrays Lopez and Jamie Foxx portrays Ayers. There are multiple differences between the book and the movie; however, the main premise and struggles remain the same. After struggling to come up with an idea for his column for the Los Angels Times, Lopez meets Ayers, a homeless man, who is playing a violin that has only two strings. Besides Ayers’s disheveled state and missing violin strings, the thing that stood out was his inability to hold a proper conversation as he continued to talk …show more content…
Ayers’s schizophrenia was shown through an outsider’s view and was limited only to what was externally expressed. The movie, however, took liberty in the portrayal of Ayers’s mental state. Throughout the movie, Ayers’s flashbacks are used to portray both his mental states and to give further insight into his past. These flashbacks show Ayers childhood, time in Julliard, mental breakdown in his apartment, and his fight with his sister before he ran way to L.A. It can be seen that while he lived in poverty, he led a relatively normal childhood. The only difference is that he developed such a passion for music that his whole would centered around the cello. Ayers developed schizophrenia while at Julliard as could be shown through symptoms occurring gradually. While playing in class, voices could be heard by Ayers but not the rest of the room. These voices commented on how everyone was watching him and could hear him, which then hindered him from being able to play the cello. The voices then told him to run away, which he then followed. At one point, he was shown in an auditorium surrounded by people and talking to friends, but a second later he was shown in the same location completely alone. He starts to struggle differentiating between what is real and what is in his head. He called his mother on a payphone stating, “It's so frightening, and… And I'm having trouble differentiating certain things. Keeping things separated.” The irony of this situation was that he was not talking to his mother but to the dial tone on the phone. The flashback in Ayers’s first apartment shows him breaking down as his mental state finally breaks him down to nothing but a crying ball on the floor. It can be inferred that this experience was the reason for his fear of having his own apartment. Finally, the flashback with his sister, coincided with