The soul is a mysterious beast.
For Paul Giamatti (played by Paul Giamatti), a neurotic, disgruntled New York actor of the Woody Allen variety, the soul is also incredibly vulnerable. While struggling with a stage play of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” (in which he plays the title character), Paul, feeling burdened by mounting pressures and insecurities (like any good neurotic) which are starting to affect his work, comes across an article in The New Yorker profiling Soul Storage, a company which specializes in removing one’s soul from their flesh-and-blood confinement. Before long Paul finds himself in Soul Storage’s sparse, ominous offices (where the souls of celebrities line the walls and marshmallows serve as finger food for patient clients), where he is coerced into undergoing the procedure by Dr. Flintstein (a giddy David Stratharin) one minute and finds himself in a spherical (and vaguely vaginal) “soul extractor” the next; he’s soon distraught to find that his soul is not unlike a “chick pea” in both size and appearance, a gag which the film will mine to hilarious results throughout.
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For a while, Paul is happy. Then reality kicks in. Much to his dismay, Paul finds that being soulless feels very much like being empty inside (“I can’t feel anything!”, he gripes). His wife (Emily Watson) says he feels cold and distant, and imagines he’s been cheating on her; his work, once merely confused, now takes on such an overblown theatricality that Paul seems to momentarily morph into William Shatner right before our eyes. An emotional wreck, he returns to Stratharin to reclaim his discarded soul; much to his chagrin, he learns that it’s been stolen right out from under them.
After an ingenious first act, where the laughs come easy and often, Cold Souls soon settles for a more leisurely, melancholic pacing that reaches for lyricism but often settles for “brooding and elliptical.” It’s at this point that we’re formally introduced to Nina (Dina Korzun), who works as a mule for shady Russian “soul traffickers”, and Olga, a Russian factory worker and amateur poet whose soul winds up serving as a temp for Paul. After his own soul has been shipped overseas and now resides in a wannabe actress (Katheryn Winnick) with ties to the Russian mob (who in another hilarious running gag that keeps on giving is convinced that the soul is Al Pacino’s), Paul joins with Nina to get it back, turning the latter half of the picture into an odd buddy pseudo-comedy as the duo contend with shady mobsters and businessmen to bargain for Paul’s soul. Unfortunately, it’s here that the film also starts to slip up a bit, shifting gears a bit too haphazardly and stumbling a little as it races to a rather poignant, thoughtfully ambiguous finish.
Much has been made of Sophie Barthes’ debut and its sub-Charlie Kaufman status (consider the pet name “Being Paul Giamatti”, given to the film following its premiere earlier this year at the Sundance film festival); while Cold Souls does belong to the same absurdist, self-aware comedy sub-genre that Kaufman currently resides over, whereas films like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation trade in subversive irony and wacky hijinks (I mean that in the best way possible), Cold Souls, owing a bigger debt to Woody Allen’s Sleeper, is just a bit less distinctive and humorous, and a touch more portentous. And unlike Kaufman’s films, having Paul Giamatti ostensibly play a caricature of himself is less a probing, self-aware deconstruction of celebrity than a rather odd creative choice that only occasionally pays dividends.
Like most films, Cold Souls shines when it focuses on character rather than the mechanics of it’s (rather ludicrous) plot; when Giamatti is doing his thing, especially in the early going, it sets the bar so high that the remainder of the film sadly can’t keep up. Be that as it may, though, Cold Souls is still solid — it hits more than it misses, and when it does it packs quite a punch. Just don’t expect the next Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; expect a thoughtful, intelligent film that’s willing to slip up (if not quite so willingly own it), and you may be pleasantly surprised.
8 out of 10
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