A very private showing

About two weeks ago on a Sunday afternoon, my wife and I went to the Ward Parkway movie complex to see “The Soloist.” We were the only people in a theater that seats about 300. To tell the truth, it was a scary atmosphere, one which neither of us had ever before experienced. Where were the people? The local paper had reviewed the film very favorably. Robert Butler gave it a three-and-a-half stars rating. Movie critics in big cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago had lauded the film.

So the two of us had a private showing. The film was chilling from the beginning to the end. At times, it was agony to watch. Half of the audience (Ruthie) would have preferred to walk out on it in the middle. The other half was entranced by what he saw. The film was essentially about two characters: a mentally disturbed musical genius obsessed by the name and the music of Beethoven, whose madness drove him to live among the homeless, the hungry and the harassed of Los Angeles. It was there that he strummed his cello and played themes from the music of Beethoven.

It was among the destitute homeless that our second main character espied the schizophrenic musician. He was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times looking for a “human-interest” story to publish in his newspaper. His initial motive in befriending Nathaniel (the name of the eerie musician) was his search for a really different kind of narrative to submit to his paper. It did not take very long for him to develop an ever-growing compassion for Nathaniel. His driving desire was to bring the homeless and prattling genius into “normal” society, to have him play before “normal” audiences and with “normal” musicians.

And Beethoven was the most important tool the reporter used in temporarily and sporadically bringing Nathaniel into the realm of rational behavior. Toward that end, he labored fanatically and tirelessly. The thrust of “The Soloist” is the frustration of both characters because of the failure of the logical to prevail in an illogical climate, the failure of reason in a universe dominated by unreason, the failure of truth to eradicate untruthful dogmas that become the gods of those incapable of sanity.

In Yiddish, we might describe the situation as, “Red tsu zay und red tsu der vant!” (Talk to them and you might as well be talking to the wall.) As I see it, “The Soloist” is a picture of the world we live in. It is a world of Gingrich and Cheney, a world of fear, panic, dissimulation, perversion and violence. It is we, the people, who must bear the responsibility for allowing the fiddlers who are off key — and who exploit “Beethovens” in justification of their sour notes.

Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx (who is the Soloist) should both be nominated for an Oscar.

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