The Soloist, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx, tells the story of L.A. Times columnist, Steve Lopez, and schizophrenic musician, Nathanial Ayers. The film is based on Steve Lopez’s book titled The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music. For a good review of the film, see this piece in Salon by Stephanie Zacharek. She articulates well that this film is atypical of Hollywood fare because it dwells upon what is not possible.
Lopez is a newspaper columnist who’s reached that midlife place dominated by doubt. His marriage has fallen apart and he struggles to meet deadlines in an industry that also finds itself dominated by doubt. In his daily scramble to find the next story, he stumbles upon Ayers sitting beneath a statue of Beethoven and playing on a two-stringed violin. But this becomes more than simply his next story. There is something about Ayers—his brokenness and vulnerability, his passion for music—that awakens Lopez from his cynical grind.
When Lopez first encounters Ayers, he wants to help him but isn’t sure how. He sees Ayers as a problem and wants to fix him. Lopez isn’t unusual in this regard. He reflects the dominant model for delivery of psychiatric care. This week, for example, I received a letter from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health soliciting funds for its diverse array of programs in Toronto. A good portion of the letter was devoted to testimonies and descriptions of new technologies, like Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), which will “cure” any number of mental diseases. Lopez concocts a scheme to get Ayers admitted to hospital so that the man can be forced to take meds, and shares his idea with a case worker at LAMP, an outreach centre for L.A.’s homeless. But we can see in the case worker’s eyes, and by taking a good look at the people LAMP serves, that talk of a “cure” is both naive and patronizing. As the film proceeds, we watch Lopez discover for himself that if he is going to fix anything in this situation, it won’t happen until he fixes his own view of things.
Among the things I appreciate about this film, two stand out. First, it underscores in a pointed way the relationship between mental health and chronic homelessness. Second, it illustrates how the dynamics of personal relationship echo at the policy level. Just as Lopez wanted to fix the situation for Ayers, so the mayor of Los Angeles wanted to fix the problem of homelessness. As Lopez’s columns on Ayers gained attention, the mayor responded by committing more funds to skid row. But this translated into sweeps of the street, absurd arrests for illegal possession of milk crates, and physical violence. As with personal relationships, the political desire to “cure” the problem is both naive and patronizing. By toggling between close-ups of people and aerial shots of the city, the film subtly tells us that mental health and homelessness are multi-dimensional issues that must be viewed at both micro and macro levels.
The Soloist is about grief and acceptance. Virginia Lafond has written a helpful book titled Grieving Mental Illness: a guide for patients and their caregivers, which is premised on the observation that everyone who wrestles with mental illness, either in themselves or in those they care for, engages a grieving process. There is a sense of loss and of helplessness. The impulse to fix things is a natural stage in the grieving process—a kind of bargaining with higher powers. But when our gods prove impotent, then we move on. In the Soloist, Lopez moves on to the recognition that he can best serve Ayers by simply being present to him, making no demands, recognizing both the gifts and the limitations of this man he is honoured to call a friend. What would such acceptance look like at the macro level? At the level of political policy and institutional health care?