Movie Reviews: "The Soloist"

[JamesG]

Movie Reviews: The Soloist
24 April 2009 2:44 AM, PDT


Critics are greeting The Soloist, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx, with considerable applause.

Calling it "poignant" and "heartfelt," Claudia Puig in USA Today concludes, "It presents a moving tribute to friendship and the power of music."
The two lead actors receive much praise for their performances -- Downey, especially.

"With small gestures or a single word, the actor conveys a complicated, comical personality," writes Rafer Guzmán in Newsday.

Says Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe & Mail: "Few actors can play wry and rueful as persuasively as Downey, and his portrayal of a scruffy writer in a flailing profession is overripe but characteristically witty."

As for Foxx's performance as a homeless musician who once studied at Juilliard, Chris Kaltenbach in the Baltimore Sun comments, "Foxx is magnificent, taking a role that could be exorbitantly showy ... and turning in a performance that's controlled and mesmerizing."

But Manohla Dargis of the New York Times has conflicted feelings about the film. She writes: "The film is imperfect, periodically if unsurprisingly sentimental, overly tidy and often very moving. It works hard to make you feel good, as is to be expected, even as it maintains a strong sense of moral indignation that comes close to an assertion of real politics.
Outrage would be too much for a mainstream entertainment like this one to manage. Like its muckraking journalist guide, it exploits its subjects for its own purposes. But its commitment to the material feels honest."

And Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times summed up: "The Soloist has all the elements of an uplifting drama, except for the uplift. The story is compelling, the actors are in place, but I was never sure what the filmmakers wanted me to feel about it."

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