Book vs. Movie: The Soloist
By Russ Bickerstaff
April 27, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
In this corner: the Book. A collection of words that represent ideas when filtered through the lexical systems in a human brain. From clay tablets to bound collections of wood pulp to units of stored data, the book has been around in one format or another for some 3,800 years.
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Film.
The Soloist
In 2005, LA Times Columnist Steve Lopez ran into a homeless man playing a violin on a street corner. After a few conversations with the gentleman, he decided the musician's situation was fascinating enough write about in his column. Evidently the man in question was Nathaniel Ayers - a talented musician who had bombed out of the prestigious Julliard Music School years ago and was now living on the dangerous streets of LA, suffering from schizophrenia. One column about Ayers led to another, and another. Before long the series had become popular enough that Lopez was working on a novel about Nathaniel. Even before Lopez's book was released, a number of people in the Hollywood film industry had already read Lopez's columns about Nathaniel and were interested in turning his story into a movie. Now, only a very brief amount of time after the novel was released, its big-budget film adaptation hits the screens. How do film and book treatments of Nathaniel Ayers' story compare?
The Book
Prior to meeting Nathaniel Ayers, Lopez had written a few books and literally hundreds of columns. Primarily a journalist, Lopez saw Ayers playing in the streets of LA on a violin with only two strings and realized that he had a story. The novel that came out of the columns about Ayers that he wrote for the LA Times follows the largely journalistic style of the columns.
In an admirably pragmatic style forged from a journalist's endless shower of pressing deadlines, Lopez relates the story of meeting Ayers. It's crisp, simple prose that recognizes the uniquely interesting nature of Ayers' story - the tragedy of mental illness and homelessness. From first encounter to subsequent meetings to visiting Ayers on Skid Row and beyond, we get a book that delivers information without embellishing the account with any unnecessary poetry or personification. While this is very admirable, it lacks the kind of inspiration that might've been found in a book by a more accomplished author of fiction.
Lopez carefully assembles the story of Ayers' past, weaving it deftly into his own personal journey in helping him out. We see the struggles of a man battling inner demons through the lens of a man whose desire to get the story across and genuinely make a difference keeps him from his wife and daughter. It's a very touching piece of journalism that is distanced enough from its own subject matter to show an impressive amount of complexity in the issues it's presenting. We see a man who was once a very promising concert musician get lost in his own psychosis under the overwhelming pressure of studying at such a high-caliber school. Lopez outlines his efforts to get Ayers back into a safe life indoors. Recovery from any kind of mental disorder NEVER happens in a straight line and Lopez does a pretty good job of illustrating the many breakthroughs and setbacks in Ayers' progress. Perhaps Lopez's biggest accomplishment in the course of the book is giving it a sense of resolution in the end while simultaneously making it perfectly clear that Ayers may never have a normal life the way mainstream society defines it.
As a really interesting side note to the central story, Lopez talks about his own situation as a journalist. With the viability of print publications dwindling to an all-time low, Lopez casts an occasional glance at the nature of print journalism with the media technology and world culture being in flux. It's not a real strong undercurrent, but it adds to the overall experience of the novel, giving it firm grounding in a very contemporary reality. Homelessness and mental illness have always been a part of society, but with Lopez's firm grounding in current affairs, he's reminding us that these issues are still very much a going concern that isn't going away any time soon. Above all, we get the impression that Lopez is very, very sensitive to the idea that he may be exploiting Ayers with the book, the columns and ultimately the film that's been based on it. Overall, we get the impression that if he IS exploiting Ayers, he's doing it to cast light on a problem that simply will NOT go away on its own. It's an admirable goal and it makes The Soloist a profoundly emotionally dynamic book.
The Movie
With LA's immersion in the film industry, Hollywood descended on Lopez pretty quickly. Numerous producers asked him for the opportunity to do the film, so presumably he had his pick. He seems to have chosen pretty wisely in the team of Russ Krasnoff and Gary Foster. What with Lopez being as sensitive to Ayers' needs as he had been in the book, gaining his trust on a project like this must've been a task akin to Lopez's work getting Ayers to trust him. The producers ended up going with screenwriter Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich) to do the script. Grant met with Lopez and promptly went to work.
Grant did an admirable job of streamlining the novel into a feature film-length drama. What with Lopez's writing style being as straight ahead and journalistic as it is, she had to do a considerable amount of work framing the information that Lopez relates in the book. Why she didn't keep it at as simple as that is anybody's guess.
The story of Lopez and Ayers' friendship is solid and dramatic enough without having to mess with it any further. Perhaps it was pressures that were put on Grant by the producers that caused her to change Lopez's character significantly, perhaps not. Regardless of what the situation was, Grant elected to make Lopez divorced. Rather than dealing with the stress of working extensively on a project with Ayers that seemed to have questionable results - working with a man who seemed so opposed to his help at times, the stress of dealing with that while realizing that he was not spending nearly enough time with his wife and daughter - that internal stress is completely taken out of the story. Instead, we get a Lopez who is afraid to get too close to anyone because love hasn't been good to him. One loner helping another out seems much less dynamic than a happily married man with a young daughter trying to help someone else out while sacrificing time he could be spending with his family. Instead of this, we get shots of Lopez drinking alone in a vacuous apartment and hanging bags of coyote urine to ward off pests.
The film's press kit suggests that the loner/coyote urine thing was done in order, "to add an extra layer of isolation to the columnist's world." On the surface of things, this makes sense: it adds to the mirror relationship between author and subject. On further analysis, this simply doesn't seem significant. Are alcohol and coyote urine really that much more compelling than a wife and a child? If that's the case, then I seem to have made a major error in my own life . . .
Robert Downey Jr. puts in his usual impressive performance onscreen. Here, he's playing Lopez in a way that is uniquely Downey Jr. When the actor met with the author, he was impressed with Lopez. Downey is quoted as saying, "Steve is very charming, very engaging and a great storyteller but, when we met, he insisted that I not try to impersonate him in any way, so we ended up going in a somewhat different direction," The resulting performance is interesting without being particularly specific to who the real Steve Lopez is. This takes the film away from being an outright docudrama and turns it into something else. The only redeeming quality of taking Lopez's family away in the film lies in allowing him more time onscreen to be alone. Downey Jr. has the kind of screen presence that excels in solitude, but Lopez's family IS sorely missed onscreen.
For his part, Jamie Foxx wanted to be as true to the character as possible and he does a remarkable job here. Foxx, who had studied classical music as a child, took to learning Ayers' instruments as quickly as possible. He met and spent time with Ayers in an effort to get as close as possible to the man he would be portraying. The performance is phenomenal. The only problem here is the fact that the script doesn't allow the less endearing side of Ayers' schizophrenia to surface onto the film. Almost entirely absent is the Ayers who claimed he wasn't black, would sometimes make racist remarks and draw swastikas on the ground. Without getting into the complexity of the character's negative side, the film isn't doing the kind of job it should be doing in bringing such a fascinating person to the screen. Foxx's performance is good, but it only goes so far.
Director Joe Wright made some admirable choices in putting together the film that need to be recognized here. Rather than getting a large group of SAG extras to play the homeless of LAMP and Skid Row, he spent several days with the residents there and gained enough of their trust that they allowed themselves to be used for the film. Filming on location in LAMP and around an approximation of Skid Row circa 2005 (prior to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's Safer City Initiative) there's a kind of a raw authenticity to the film that goes a long way toward making-up for the low-level Hollywood-ization of the story by eliminating Lopez's family. Wright was also given the opportunity to film at the LA Times on the actual floor that Lopez works on, which makes for some interesting scenes. Evidently the LA Times had never allowed people to film there before.
In addition to the authenticity, Wright does Lopez one better by bringing some artistry to the story that seems lacking in Lopez's journalistic prose style. Some of it works. Some of it doesn't. When Lopez and Ayers visit a rehearsal of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the picture fades out and we get abstract colors splashing across the screen in time to the music. It's a bit unpleasantly disorienting. A perfect example of an occasion where Wright's artistry works happens while Ayers is performing beneath an overpass. The sound of Ayers' music fills the theatre and we get a sweeping shot from a 100-foot STRADA crane that rises from the street below past the overpass and into the sky. We're seeing the beauty of LA in a really impressive sequence featuring that shot and an aerial view of pigeons flying above the busy highways of LA. For the briefest moment, this is some really profoundly beautiful stuff. It's a pity there couldn't have been more moments like that in the film.
The Verdict
While Lopez's book captures the complexity of Ayers situation and does a very admirable job of addressing issues of homelessness and schizophrenia, Lopez's style lacks the kind of poetry that would really bring the reality of Ayers' situation with any kind of substantial artistry. Wright's film treatment of the story may not have an appreciation for the complexity of the issues (or of human nature, for that matter) but his lens picks-up much of the beauty that is lost to Lopez's journalistic prose. Had the film bent just a bit more in the direction of Lopez's innate understanding of what makes the story compelling in the first place, it would've ended up being a superior work. Instead, we end up with two distinct versions of Ayers' life, neither of which end up being completely satisfying as individual works. In spite of all of this, Ayers, his editors, Wright and the film's producers are doing an admirable job of bringing attention to a side of the human experience which often gets ignored.