Knocked Down, Then Dragged Out

Reviews of a doc portrait of Mike Tyson and one of a gifted, troubled musician in "The Soloist."

Toback reserves his worst treatment for Robin Givens, who Tyson married in 1988 and divorced a year later. Toback introduces Givens with a film clip of her seducing Forest Whitaker in “A Rage in Harlem.” He could have chosen a publicity still or newsreel footage, but this role (in which she parodied the public image she acquired during the marriage to Tyson, and in which she’s sensational) allows Toback to set her up as a gold-digging whore. There’s no doubt that Givens was cruel during the couple’s interview with Barbara Walters where, while Tyson sat mutely by, she described their life together as “pure hell.” But given what Tyson himself has said, how he likes to find independent, strong-willed women and dominate them sexually, you just don’t believe him when he claims that Givens was lying.

If we don’t know the truth of the marriage or Tyson’s fight with Holyfield, Tyson himself is at least trying to be honest here. And watching how easily his self-reflection turns to self-recrimination, you can see how his anger could be directed outward. The defining moment in “Tyson,” almost a throwaway, comes when he talks about the first time he got into a fight, beating up a bigger kid who killed one of Tyson’s beloved pigeons in front of him. Tyson says it was a brawl, there was no art to it.

To the people who think of boxing as being devoid of intelligence or strategy, the distinction Tyson is making will seem nonsensical. But his frankness here continually makes you understand how his anger has messed him up both in the ring and out of it. The most touching moment may be the news footage we see of the man following his 2002 defeat by Lennox Lewis. While Lewis is talking to reporters, Tyson reaches over and tenderly brushes blood off his opponent’s cheek. The clarity that “Tyson” achieves has everything to do with how it allows us to see that lovely gesture as anything but a contradiction.

“The Soloist” is an inappropriate name for a movie that is essentially an actors’ duet. Robert Downey Jr. plays Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez (the movie, written by Susannah Grant, is based on Lopez’s book). Lopez is one of those reporters whose job is to find the odd corners and human interest stories of the city. Jamie Foxx plays Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless, disturbed man whom Lopez finds playing a two-stringed violin in front of a statue of Beethoven. A little digging turns up that Ayers was, as he claims, a Julliard student, a cellist. The response to the story, including a woman who sends a cello for Nathaniel to use, spurs Lopez to use his position and connections to try and change Lopez’s life.

There is every reason, from that description, to believe “The Soloist” is a triumph of the human spirit movie, and there are bound to be reviews that describe it that way. (Sometimes I get the feeling that it’s critics, far more than studio execs and hack screenwriters, who try to force movies into predictable, preexisting categories.) The director, Joe Wright, whose previous films were the superb adaptations of “Pride & Prejudice” and “Atonement,” has something knottier in mind, something that doesn’t lend itself so easily to sweeping emotional uplift.

The movie isn’t about how Lopez winds up changing Nathaniel’s life, but about how he accepts what can’t be changed. Nathaniel is prone to paranoia and delusions. When Lopez sets up a performance for him before a small select group at the Disney Concert Hall, Nathaniel freaks out and can’t go through with it.

Along with the praise Wright has received have been some snotty reviews deriding him as a middlebrow adapter. Because “The Soloist” doesn’t have a predictable emotional arc, the picture seems to falter a bit in the last third. But working for the first time in the present day and in America, Wright demonstrates the push of a director trying new things. Seamus McGarvey’s photography captures Los Angeles as a maze and Nathaniel as an inadvertent presence under a freeway overpass or pushing his cart along streets not planned for human presence — which is why the scenes at a skid row homeless shelter seem like explosions. Wright used actual residents, and when they’re on camera, acting out or hanging out, the bottled-up energy and frustration and desperation herded into this one place are finally able to come out. It’s a remarkable piece of direction.

Foxx’s performance is a marvel of control. He doesn’t try to make Nathaniel endearing. There’s something simultaneously gentle and coiled about him. Nathaniel jabbers in a steady stream of free association that mixes observation with his own imaginings and makes it tough for Lopez to get a word in. A showboating actor would have turned Nathaniel’s prattle into a monologue, cutting out the other actors (that’s what Dustin Hoffman did in the stunt that passed for acting in “Rain Man”). Foxx holds out slivers of entrée to Downey’s Lopez and, just as quickly, yanks them back. Foxx captures the frustrating poignance of a man who’s both vulnerable and remote.

What makes Downey so suited to partner Foxx is the actor’s peculiar brand of sardonic humanism. Lopez has the expected doubts about whether he’s exploiting Nathaniel, and the movie is smart enough to treat those doubts as the moral luxury of the privileged. Downey, an actor who conveys both a loser’s melancholy and an easily aroused scrappiness, makes a great bemused, irritated, perplexed partner for Foxx’s Nathaniel. The melancholy here comes from his knowledge that his profession is dying (like “State of Play,” this is, though tangentially, a death of newspapers movie). But Downey makes the quixotic seem hip. Trying to edge into a conversation with Nathaniel, Downey’s Lopez is like a nimble sideman trying to support a high-flying soloist. He provides the bass, Foxx hits the wild notes, and their music together is beautiful.

Charles Taylor is our guest critic for the month of April.

“Tyson” opens in Los Angeles and New York on April 24rd; “The Soloist” opens wide on April 24rd.

[Additional photos: Mike Tyson and James Toback in "Tyson," Sony Pictures Classics, 2008; Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx in "The Soloist," DreamWorks/Universal, 2009]

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