The nice people at Axiom Films recently sent me a copy of Goodbye Solo (it’s just come out on DVD), so I’m armed with a handy excuse to revisit one of last year’s most acclaimed films.

On its release, Goodbye Solo was received with that gushing sincerity critics reserve for non-obnoxious indie cinema. Ben Walters of Time Out found the film to be “shot through with beauty and humility”; Neil Smith wrote in Total Film that Goodbye Solo was made of “humour, grace and compassion”; Roger Ebert enthused it was “the best film in town“. All very nicey-nicey.

Then someone mentioned Realism and a small blogging war broke out. That someone was A.O. Scott of The New York Times. Grouping Goodbye Solo with its contemporary releases Ballast, Wendy and Lucy and Treeless Mountain, Scott came to the conclusion that director Ramin Bahrami was leading a Stateside return to Neorealism (yes, that’s right: post-war, black and white, car-headlamp lit, lefty Italian cinema). It was all a gush too far for The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who felt compelled to write an eight-point rebuttal two days before Scott’s piece was even published in print. Scott quickly retreated behind a wall of critical hooey, suggested he and Brody agree to disagree, and everyone went on living as before. Ho-de-hum.

To cut a long introduction short: Goodbye Solo was widely accepted to be a good film, but, save for a few wishywashy adjectives and a self-serving storm-in-a-teablog, no one could really say why.

Watching the film now with a year’s worth of retrospect, I can’t help but feel the problem (if it is a problem) begins and ends in the ease with which Bahrami’s film watches. Goodbye Solo is set in a disenfranchised, isolated, lonely sphere of America. It hunches its shoulders to ticket-for-one late-night movie screenings, rubs its eyes through graveyard shifts in immigrant-driven taxis, and rests its head on clapped-out motel sofas. It tells the story of a man named William who wants to kill himself though won’t say why. It paces its narrative with all the drive of an inmate on death row. Everything about this film suggests its viewer should either be humbled, harrowed or bored. And yet Goodbye Solo is a distinctly feel-good movie.

Part of this undoubtedly stems from Solo, the taxi driver who realises William’s deathly intent and eventually acquiesces to ferrying him along the River Styx. A Senegalese-American, Solo is warm, affectionate, magnetic, and sensitive: a scriptwriter’s dream. He is also fluid. No-one changes or compromises in Goodbye Solo apart from Solo, who has to come to terms with William’s silent determination to die. The water in the wilting flower’s vase, Solo continues to supply William nutrients while himself being altered in hue. It makes him very human, very real.

But Realism (capital R), that will-o-the-wisp of modern film criticism, isn’t really at stake in Goodbye Solo. Certainly not Neorealism, which was socially minded posturing dressed up in filmmaking politik. If anything, Goodbye Solo shares more in common with what came after neorealism – Fellini’s apocryphal tales of the early ’50s, where society was only interesting insofar as it was a part of the alienated individual. Even that assertion is dubious, though. To talk earnestly of Goodbye Solo in terms of Realism is to open a can of hogwash that isn’t on the shelf in the first place.

Unlike the high-falutin’ debate Goodbye Solo engendered (one keen blogger found it to be a study in dialectics), the film sets its horizons very low. This is a love story, pure and simple. Bahrami isn’t really interested in the wider socio-political implications of his characters. Solo doesn’t drive others around enough, William doesn’t shut down enough, and there’s too little outside context (no one else in the film gets more than five minutes screen time) to suggest otherwise. Instead, like the best love stories, Goodbye Solo is interested in its characters as characters; not as frameworks burdened with theory.

Bahrami’s filmmaking never loses sight of that fact. His camera serves his story, not vice versa. Its frame offers easy-on-the-eye, unclouded compositions; its editing rhythm is gentle, never overt. Not once does Goodbye Solo step outside its remit to suggest things are afoot that are not. Instead, Bahrami tells an engaging story about two interesting men with taste and simplicity. Goodbye Solo is fantastically easy and fun to watch as a result.

Sometimes you just have to kick back and enjoy a film for what it is. Pure and simple.

One Response to “DVD Review: Goodbye Solo”

1. Werner Herzog Spotted #1 | Orson's Well says:

   09/03/2010 at 3:21 pm

   [...] a tasty tidbit I almost missed when reviewing the DVD release of Goodbye Solo the other day: The DVD extras include an 18 minute artsy short titled Paper Bag that’s [...]