No Ordinary Fool

The premise of this humanistic drama is a straightforward one. Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane), an immigrant from Senegal, works nights as a taxi driver in Winston-Salem. One of his regular fares is a surly old man called William (Red West), whom he takes to the cinema once a week. The story begins with William offering Solo a large amount of money to bring him on a one-way trip to a local beauty spot in the nearby mountains in a fortnight’s time. Concerned that William may be feeling suicidal, Solo, an innately generous and gregarious being, finds himself deeply troubled by such a prospect and, almost instinctively, starts to involve himself in the other man’s life. If this brings Poppy from Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky to mind, then you would not be far wrong!

Now, for this story to work, the audience needs to accept a few unlikely plot developments. However, such matters are not worth obsessing about, given that they allow the tall, muscular, and extroverted Solo and the short, pot-bellied and brusque William to form this entirely incongruous relationship. At the same time, writer-director Ramin Bahrani is not interested in creating some worthy but melodramatic tearjerker here. Rather, through the humour of the good-natured Solo’s attempts to connect with the crabby William, the exploration of themes such as social alienation, responsibility, and family, as well as some glimpses of life on the darkened fringes of this North Carolinian city, he provides the audience with a modern tale about how we relate to and care for those around us.

After all, Solo is an immigrant taxi driver who is clearly frustrated by the constraints of his current job. However, he needs to balance this with the reality of having his first child on the way and a stepfamily to look after. While his motivation to help William seems sincere, it is also a useful way for him to avoid dealing with problems closer to home. Hence, as the film progresses, the realisation dawns that it is not necessarily William who may need to adjust his perspective on life, but Solo. This includes a very touching insight that the latter gains in the final third.

While this aspect of the film is well handled, Bahrani ends up putting forward a very quiet case for why someone may be rationally choosing to end his or her life. Given the whole hullabaloo over “death lists” in the United States at present, this would have seemed a relatively opportune moment for such a film to be in theatres. Yet, with the audience primarily limited to seeing William from Solo’s perspective, it takes a while for simplistic assumptions to melt away and for a slightly clearer picture of this taciturn man to emerge. At the same time, while there is much merit in the lean and dignified nature of the tense final act, William mostly remains a mystery – one of those intriguing but far too truncated conversations, you could say, in the taxi of our lives.

An impressive blend of thoughtful understatement and dry humour, on the whole.