The Soloist

The other night I watched The Soloist, a pretty good movie with Robert Downey, Jr., that I had hoped to go see when it was out in the theaters but never did. It's a movie about a cellist who ends up homeless, but more importantly it's a movie about a relationship, a friendship between two men. The title takes on certain existential hues in that light, since the difficult nature of the relationship raises the question, "Just how alone are we in this life?"

Watching the movie by myself reminded me of when I was a teenager and had rented The Color Purple to watch with a girl. Looking back, it was certainly an odd choice, but this girl was particularly annoyed with me because she said I always watched depressing movies and that probably made me more depressed. I could have launched into a lecture on the complex nature of art, and how what is seen as depressing is often just dark and reflective of man's essential inhumanity to man, because after all, what does a happy story tell you? What does it teach you?

But I think it was more correct to say that I liked (and like) depressing movies because of some version of the malady known as anhedonia that I have inside myself -- basically an inabililty to enjoy oneself when you know others are suffering.

Parts of the movie reminded me of myself in other odd ways, such as the fact that the RDJ character is divorced and doesn't want anybody to rely on him because he'll just end up disappointing them. A pretty sorry excuse when you hear it from somebody else. At the end of the movie, too, after the RDJ character angers the Jamie Fox character (the cellist), he says, "Hey, friends piss each other off sometimes, right?" It's such a simple line with real resonance that says something about the nature of friendship, I think. It seems I've pissed people off in the past and not been able to come back from that, and I think that's unfortunate. Because friends do piss each other off, if they're honest sometimes.