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 By Peter T. Chattaway
LOOSELY BASED on the true story of a journalist who
befriended a homeless, schizophrenic man who also happened to be a really
talented musician, The Soloist is a somewhat messy and slightly clichéd but
nonetheless interesting look at our need for grace, and the surprising
places it can come from. It also has a surprisingly high quotient of
God-talk.
The story concerns Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.), a
columnist for theLos Angeles Times who bumps into a rambling, violin-playing street person
named Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) one day – and thinks there might
be a story there, after Ayers says something about having attended
Juilliard once. One column leads to another, readers respond to the story,
and before long an actual relationship of sorts grows between the two men.
When one reader sends a cello to the paper as a gift
for Ayers, Lopez arranges for Ayers to play the instrument at Lamp
Community, an organization that specializes in helping the mentally ill.
Lopez also arranges for Ayers to take music lessons from Graham Claydon
(Tom Hollander), a professional cellist who also happens to be a pious
Christian.
The religious signals sent by this movie kind of go all
over the place – but it’s better, I think, to have a movie stir
things up and engage our minds and hearts than to make things too tidy.
It is not clear, for example, why Lamp Community or one
of its neighbours would have a large neon sign that quotes Romans 6:23
(“The wages of sin is death,” etc.), or why the film would
focus on this sign two or three times. It is also unfortunate that
Claydon’s good intentions are obscured by a sort of cluelessness in
his dealings with Ayers.
But the film also makes an explicit point or two about
the power of grace to lift people up, and a key sequence set among the
homeless makes interesting use of the Lord’s Prayer, as recited by
Ayers.
Add to this a scene in which an atheist interviewed by
Lopez comes off looking kind of silly, and you have a film that is more
pro-faith than not.
• • •
The Nativity Story was
considered something of a box-office disappointment when it came out two
and a half years ago, but that isn’t stopping other filmmakers from
tackling the same subject matter. Two more movies on the birth of Jesus are
now in the works.
Fox Searchlight recently announced that it would
produce a film version of Black Nativity, a gospel musical written by the late Langston Hughes that
was one of the first plays written by an African-American to premiere on
Broadway when it opened in 1961.
Variety says the studio may
be planning to release the film as early as this Christmas, which would
make this an awfully fast production. The film will be directed by Kasi
Lemmons, an actress whose previous directorial credits include Eve’s Bayou and Talk to Me.
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Meanwhile, MGM has announced several key cast members
for Mary, Mother of Christ, which the studio has been developing for the past two years. The
film will star Camilla Belle as Mary, Al Pacino as Herod the Great, Peter
O’Toole as Symeon, Jessica Lange as Anna the Prophetess and Jonathan
Rhys Meyers as both Gabriel and Lucifer.
Written by Benedict Fitzgerald (The Passion of the Christ) and Barbara
Nicolosi, founder of the Act One screenwriting school, Mary, Mother of Christ will be directed
by Alejandro Agresti, whose last film was the time-bending love story The Lake House.
• • •
Swedish director Mikael Håfström –
whose last film was the Stephen King horror movie 1408 – has been tapped to direct The Rite, based on the new book
by Matt Baglio about an exorcism school in Italy. The script is by Michael
Petroni, who was recently hired to write the film version of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Baglio has been quite open about the fact that his work
on the book convinced him of the reality of demons, and brought him back to
the Catholic church. Whether the movie will honour those intentions is
anyone’s guess, but here’s hoping.
• • •
Why let your kids watch cartoons on TV when they can be
making cartoons at church? The Breath of Life
Animation Festival is returning to Cedar Park
Church in South Delta next month, and like last year’s festival, it
will include workshops on claymation, hand-drawn animation, flip books and
similar things, followed by a screening of short films.
The festival is organized by Ken Priebe, a contributor
to theHollywood Jesus website and a faculty member at the Vancouver Institute of Media
Arts – who literally wrote the book onThe
Art of Stop-Motion Animation.
In addition to all the other activities, he says this
year’s festival will include a presentation on ‘Animation as an
Act of Worship.’
The doors open at 1pm June 6.
– filmchatblog.blogspot.com
May 2009
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