Having read the memoir by Los Angeles Times journalist Steve Lopez, I was eager to sit down with the movie version, starring Robert Downey Jr. as Lopez and Jamie Foxx as his muse, the gifted yet mentally troubled Nathaniel Ayers. If you haven’t read The Soloist, you may get more out of the movie: but if you have read the book, like reading Marley & Me and then stumbling through the Owen Wilson-Jennifer Aniston feature film, you may recognize that pieces are missing and be slightly disappointed. Either way, the symbiotic nature of the Lopez-Ayers relationship is worth catching for the first time, one way or the other.
Lopez is a divorced journalist who is constantly threatened with losing his job, not because he’s bad at what he does but because the budget cuts and dwindling readership are cutting into the profit. Stumbling upon Nathaniel playing a violin on the street, Lopez realizes that he has found a story worth writing about: a Julliard-educated student who never made it to graduation but ended up on the streets, battling the voices in his head. But before you get turned away already, consider a few of the following.
When it comes to music, Nathaniel is brilliant. But the voices in his head (schizophrenia) are constantly tearing him down and making him doubt who he is and what he is doing. And we might not literally have voices in our head, but there are people and situations constantly aimed at knocking us down a peg and making us feel worthless. It’s worth considering that Nathaniel’s demons literally drive him to the street and away from the thing that he loves. What do we lose when we let the voices make us doubt ourselves?
On the other hand, Nathaniel comes to call Lopez his god. His god is one who magically flies all over L.A. and delivers musical instruments to Nathaniel, who sets him up with an apartment to play his music and then live in, and who stops and talks to Nathaniel man-to-man. Nathaniel understands something about incarnational living because of the way Lopez loves him, not as a hopeless wreck but a man who needs someone to hold onto him and help him stand again on his own.
I don’t think that Lopez ever admits some theological or moral argument that drives him to do what he does, but he does understand something about Nathaniel that people haven’t seen in awhile. Nathaniel hears the music and loves the sound so much… and Lopez wants to feel something that much, too. Nathaniel loves Lopez for loving him, and Lopez loves Nathaniel for being the kind of person (pure, focused) that Lopez wants to be. In the process, they love each other closer to fullness and strength, because one man stopped to talk to another and saw his worth (God’s creation) even under all the built-up hurt.
That’s who we need to be: people who see others as God created them, and people willing to love them back to wholeness. That’s not one person; that’s community.
