The Soloist. . .

Based on Steve Lopez' book about his relationship with former cello prodigy, Nathaniel Ayers, mentally ill and living in the Dickensian shadow world of Los Angeles' 90,000 homeless, The Soloist,while often moving - and filled with the glorious sounds of great music, comes up short.

What is of particular interest to actors, though, is how Jamie Foxx navigates his way through the tortured mind of a schizophrenic genius. To put it simply, an actor can't play a crazy person. It's impossible - in the same way as playing "God" or "The Devil" is impossible. Nor can you be "in limbo", as many writers suggest - unless you know the color of the rug and where the toilet is. But I digress.

The clear answer here is that when playing a mentally unbalanced person, as Leonardo DiCaprio did in Gilbert Grape,many years ago and Jamie Foxx does now in The Soloist, is to play each beat, accompanied by the appropriate emotional and physical support, string them together - and let the text create the impression of mental illness. In other words, dear actor, you simply organize the beats as you would with any other character and trust to the text and environment to do the rest of the work for you. The temptation is to generalize, to try and play a concept of crazy. It's a mistake.

Remember Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate or George Burns in Oh, God? These chaps went beat by beat doing horrible things and wonderful things in their respective movies and the circumstances prescribed by the writers and directors of these pictures made Pacino The Devil - and Burns a cigar smoking God with coke bottle eyeglasses. Just play the beats, trust the script to do the rest of the work for you.