In Review: The Soloist

I’ve wanted to be a journalist since I was a young kid. Strangely enough, I always loved getting newsletters at school, enjoyed reading the bulletins that were meant for parents and printed on brightly colored papers with comic sans font. I enjoyed reading them so much, that I eventually created my own in the middle of my elementary school education. I called it the Neighborhood News, and for a few weeks only, it was a weekly periodical that I distributed to my five neighbors. In it, I put in weather updates for the week, maybe a crossword puzzle, and would ask the few recipients of my newsletter what they were doing lately. The neighborhood was aware of who was going where for vacation, whose garden had just produced a hearty amount of tomatoes, and other mundane ‘news’ that no one probably cared about. It was my first experience with “profit.” My dad recommended I sold these plain printed pages with a staple in the corner for seventy-five cents. A quarter went to ‘saving’ for the paper it took to produce these little gems, another quarter went to ‘saving’ for the ink it took to print them, and the last quarter went straight to my grubby little hands. I thought it was a sweet deal, and once I found out that what I was doing was a very amateur form of journalism and that people actually got paid decent money to do it, I was hooked.

However, the problem started as I started to get older, and I started to become a little more introverted. I had given up on my Neighborhood News only a few weeks after I had started it, and started taking a real journalism class in high school. The thought of talking to people started to make me nervous, and I mostly stuck to writing reviews on different movies and music, and tried to remain as pretentious as possible whilst doing so. Then during my senior year, I started taking journalism courses at the college, and writing JUST reviews was not an option. I had to start talking to people and I generally liked to keep my interviews short and sweet. My town is not exactly an inspiring place, and unfortunately, I had this mind set throughout the entire year of that class.

Sometimes it just takes a little push to inspire someone to be a little bit better at what they’re doing. For me, I’m easily influenced by movies. If I see something in a movie, and it looks cool enough, I usually want to do it. Hell, if convincing enough, a movie could make me aspire to be a stripper. I’m serious. I am still a bit of an introvert, so while the stripper aspiration will probably never come true, I have finally found a movie that relates to my chosen field of work in life, and also made me regret my ‘everyone is boring’ opinion that I carried with me throughout high school.

That movie was The Soloist. I’m late on this movie, it was in theaters months ago, and has probably been out on DVD for a while, but from the previews I remember it included a few of my favorite things: journalism, classical music, and a silver fox (Robert Downey Jr =]). And even better, it is based on a true story.

Steve Lopez (Downey Jr.) is a columnist for the LA Times, and during a reflective walk through the downtown Los Angeles area, he comes across Nathaniel Ayers (played by Jamie Foxx), a homeless man dressed in flamboyant colors who is playing erratic melodies on a violin with only two strings. In search of a story that doesn’t involve him giving blood for the entertainment of his readers, Lopez sits around and listens to the homeless man babble on about random things. Using his journalist eye, Lopez notices a few names scratched on the wall next to Nathaniel, and when he asks about them, he is surprised when he is informed that they are the names of his school mates at Juilliard. Sensing the potential of a story, Lopez leaves Nathaniel on the streets and heads back to the office and starts his hunt for him in the Juilliard records.

Within a few weeks and a few more conversations with Nathaniel, Lopez discovers that the homeless man is much more than a rambling idiot with an instrument. He unveils the whole past of Nathaniel’s life as a music lover, and a student of music at Juilliard School, all the way up until when and why he became homeless (much to my disappointment, Nathaniel didn’t blame it on the a-a-a-a-a-alcohol). When it is revealed that he suffers from schizophrenia, Lopez takes it into his hands to help Nathaniel through his mental illness, and get him back to playing the classical music that filled his passions as a child and as a grown man. The stories that Lopez wrote on Nathaniel and his interesting past touched a lot of people, and a moved reader even donated an old cello of hers to the use of Nathaniel to use and play. Lopez also won a media award for his series on the homeless musician. Even more importantly, he won the friendship of an unlikely contender just by taking the time to talk and listen to him.

Not only did this movie tell an amazing story of how someone went to having it all, to having nothing at all after being robbed by a mental illness, but it also instills the sense in you that everyone does have a story. I have to say that this movie did inspire me to start writing more again, and my interviews will no longer be of the short-and-sweet variety.