TeewhY's review: Good Bye Solo

Goodbye Solo is the latest film from internationally-acclaimed filmmaker Ramin Bahrani(Chop shop, Man push cart). A simple heartwarming story with a lot of depth for the human soul. It also leaves you wondering at its implications after the last scene fades off.

The film set in Winston-Salem, N.C with Solo the alarmingly cheerful cab driver making his way through life in America. One day a white old man gets into Solo's cab and makes a deal with him. Giving him $1000 if Solo would drive him up to Blowing Rock mountains in 10 days time. Blowing Rock mountain is so windy its been said that if you throw a stick into the valleys it will blow back at you. No return trip is mentioned.

Goodbye Solo has been suggested to be a neo neo realism film (Half Nelson, Wendy and Lucy), where at the core of the film are the people in it. How its characters interact, and go through life in a certain situation.

Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane) the high spirited cab driver whose warmth and good nature is shown throughout the movie. He has much love for his step-daughter Alex (Diana Franco Galindo), loyalty to his wife Quiera (Carmen Leyva), and even friendly service to the local drug dealer. At first the movie started off slow for me, but quickly Solo's infectious smile and enthusiasm for life wore me down.

The white man who made the deal with Solo is William (Red West), a man who seldom smiles or even talks. Through the movie we don't learn much about William, except we can speculate that hes lived an unsatisfied life of regret. Solo opens his house and family to william with open arms, and even sharing his dreams of being a flight attendant. Yet through the whole movie William never shares anything with Solo. In one segment Solo says to him "I'm telling you everything......why do you lie to me?".

What makes this film work are the subtle moments between Solo and William. Where the eyes and the expression of the Actors say it all. Also the fact that most of these characters are played by non professional actors. Ramin Bahrani seems to enjoy putting real people into these situations, and in return he gets a very genuine human film. And most of all this film itself has a heart, a heart for the every day, a heart for the city its set in, and a heart for the characters in the film.

I understand that this film might be a bit boring to some people, and i wouldn't challenge your opinion if you said it did. But if your a person who likes films which observe its characters and let the interaction of people help develop, change and growth in the person; then this will be a beautiful movie for you. In Goodbye Solo we ponder about what Solo and William both took from their time together. With Solo a younger man, and a outsider who has just arrived in America with dreams and aspirations. While William whose been in America for a longer time, is older and near the end of his life. Two different people with different points of view in life.

The film doesn't blatantly say why William wants to go Blowing rock mountain, nor do we know exactly what experience Solo took from William and vice versa. That is because its for them to know, and for us to decide ourselves what we experienced and discovered from it.

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Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room.

My wife and I just rented this movie from Blockbuster tonight. I was a cab driver for a few years in Seattle, with a cab company called "North End Taxi". They still use radio's instead of computer dispatch. So this movie has quite a bit of nostalgia for me. =)

I like the fact that they put non profesional actors and or real people in this movie. It's great when you have people, not "act" so much as "react" to the authentic situations they set up in the movie. My wife and I saw a christian movie called "Rust". It was done in a small Canadian town called Kipling. They used the people that actually lived in that town, for the film.

I loved the character of Solo, as I'm sure we all do, because he is a very likable, kind and friendly guy. The only thing I didn't like about the movie, was it's ending. I'm a guy who likes an 'Alice in Wonderland' happy ending. When I saw the preview, I thought, "Ok, here's an old guy that is unhappy, astranged and isolated from his family. A woman holding a baby is saying, "You know, we love you, and we want whats best for you." In the next scene you see the little girl sitting next to William, so it looks like the mother is talking to him. So it looks like Solo found William's family and brought them to him. I said to myself, "Yeah! I think I could handle a movie like this!" But the movies ending was quite different than what the preview hinted at. Both my wife and I thought the ending quite sad. I am endeared to this movie, because my family is disfunctional, like most families in America, and my situation isn't much different from Williams. The only positive, thing I could think of William wanting to go up there, with no plans to come back, would probably be that he wanted to die with dignity. But even that kind of death, seams so meaningless to me...