In the exurbs of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a cabdriver by the cheeky and affable name of Solo, a Senegalese immigrant, picks up a crestfallen old man who asks Solo to drive him to what is known as Blowing Rock, two hours away. Skeptical at first, but affable and bantering, Solo intuits this man might want to kill himself—he’s down in the dumps, visibly depressed, with sweaty tufts of thin white hair and deep, decades-old wrinkles all over his face. His name is William, gruffly revealed amid silence and frowns that resist Solo’s good-natured banter as an egg dropped onto the ground resists bouncing. It is a grim cab fare, and the atmosphere inside the car is tense, underlined by Solo’s resistless good-humored attempts to get through to the man. He takes the money offered, still skeptical of the seriousness of the man’s intentions and wary of the life-or-death consequences of driving him.
This is the first scene of Goodbye Solo, the third feature-length film of the director Ramin Bahrani, and it initiates the spare muted journey of two people crossing paths, intertwining for a time, and separating again for the last time. Solo and William, the recurrent fare of the cabdriver, are two distant human beings approaching as through a fog, their life trajectories already established so that Solo often seems addled as to how to help someone beyond helping, desiccated, dead-set on his decision. Their age difference, less important than that of their backgrounds and life experiences (which we can only intuit), nonetheless lends their dynamic poignancy, investing William with an older, grandfatherly presence that is as hard-bitten as Solo’s younger presence is lighthearted. This age gap as such is palpable—irrespective of one man’s wish to kill himself—saddled with the burdens of life-stages and the realities borne by those that occupy them; the dynamic of two errant, voyaging strangers crossing paths, their age difference important to their dynamic, reminded me of the also-poignant, delicate transience of Lost in Translation, in which similar undercurrents play out with different results.
In Goodbye Solo, this calm enduring look at the dynamic of two characters sometimes seems strained, the actions of its disparate, forlorn characters perfunctory; this shows through in the film’s obvious conceit, which tries to make something of the tenuous dynamic and comes across as forced. But this straining after what the story entails mixes with its sober warmheartedness and its undeniable authenticity, so that the final indefinite “payoff” of the film is nonetheless moving. The last glances between the two strangers, Solo and William, two men who are parting forever, touch on the luminous certainty of the film and its dark underbelly, handled with so light a touch: the essential solitude of the human being, and our helplessness to know others as we wish they could be known. It is a dour endnote—but one with its own glories all the same.
