It’s a good thing he picked up William, too. Sure, Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane) has a wife and adores her daughter, Alex (Diana Franco Galindo), and he’s even got a kid of his own on the way, but he’s still a cabdriver. Solo’s got bigger plans than that ““ he wants to be a flight attendant. He wants to bring in the kind of money he can really be proud of, enough to keep his wife happy and send some back home to his family in Senegal. So when William (Red West) comes along, Solo thinks maybe he’s about to find something more meaningful in his life.
William isn’t like Solo’s other friends; instead of those thuggish young dudes, William is an irritable, bitter old guy. He doesn’t seem to have any family or anywhere to go except the movie theater ““ by himself ““ but in a few days, he’s going to need a ride to the mountaintop lookout Blowing Rock, and he’s willing to pay Solo $1,000 to be his driver. He won’t say why, and therein lies the mystery of “Goodbye Solo.”
This is essentially a buddy film, though, and Solo and William make a strange pairing. Solo is a friendly, intensely likeable character, played believably and with enough contagious enthusiasm to carry things along. He’ll talk to anyone. William just wishes everyone would go away. He won’t hesitate to throw out profanity when he’s upset, and the closest he gets to agreeing with anyone is staring straight ahead in silence.
He’s as sad as Solo is good-natured to the extent that he threatens to drag the movie down at times. On the other hand, when William does finally start warming up to Solo, it feels like a real victory.
No matter how much infectious energy Savane brings to the title character, though, “Goodbye Solo” cannot survive on his charm alone. Solo’s problems at home add some complexity to his story, and Alex is a welcome and charming third wheel to his odd “bromance” with William, but this is not a dense plot. When the film opens with William’s strange request for a ride to Blowing Rock, we presume it’s because the mystery behind it is worth wondering about for an hour and a half.
It’s not, and it turns out William’s enigmatic life story isn’t all that exciting either, which is too bad, because West plays him like a much more intriguing character. His silent stares of frustration and his rare but stirring outbursts demand a better explanation, and the only consolation is that “Goodbye Solo” is left ambiguous enough for the audience to think up something more interesting on its own.
The problem is not so much that William’s life turns out to be painfully ordinary, it’s that we’re led to believe otherwise from the very beginning. It could just be some of Solo’s boundless optimism rubbing off, but it really seemed as if William might have had an awesome tale to share with us. In the end, though, he’s just an irritable, old white guy with some rather unremarkable problems.
Maybe it’s not so bad that most cabdrivers keep their stories to themselves.