Cold Souls
High concept movies are difficult beasts to tame. Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are immediate analogs to Cold Souls in being inside-out explorations of the metaphysical. (Do familiarize yourself with both of these films if you have not already.) Cold Souls deals with the idea of a person willfully removing their soul to aid them with the burdens of living. It’s also about the inevitable exploitations that kind of practice and business can lead to. Paul Giamatti plays Paul Giamatti, a film and theatre actor, who undergoes this procedure, and then gets caught in a web of complications of the soul harvesting industry. Giamatti is a delicate enough actor that we can actually perceive the difference in him before and after extraction – and other developments – thank goodness. He’s also one of the few people who can pull off the red socks and white dress shoes look; it helps with his character, when he removes it.
Here we experience the absurdism of a man tracking down his lost soul, the imagining of the intimacy and self-confusion of being a vessel for someone else’s soul, and the exploration of what a soul really means in terms of identity. I confess it sounds way more navel-gazy that it actually is. I would hate to see such a concept devolve into a horrible “who am I” monologue. Thankfully writer/director Sophie Barthes avoids that trap by giving our hero Paul a quest and a hope for redemption, through what seems to have been intended as either comic or sobering circumstances. The metaphors she could have addressed are left to us, the audience, but the movie doesn’t turn into a caper either.
Giamatti is aided in his journey by soul harvesting salesman David Strathairn, radiating kind competence and yet disorganized flakiness with a flick of his hair. A mysterious blond woman Nina (Dina Korzun) floats in and out of the soul sucking workplace and eventually becomes very important to the story. She remains mysterious even when we think we know her. They are accompanied by a really cool score by Dickon Hinchliffe.
It’s interesting to see the subtle disabling quality of soullessness, and it’s great to see Giamatti react to each new direction his literal soul search takes him. It feels a little uneven, unfinished, and, I chafe to say it, but it’s true – even a little soulless. And not apparently on purpose with that. To fully commit is to implode into a dippy meditational snorefest, which would be tedium. To fully switch gears from metaphysical to caper/quest would be to devalue the quest in the first place. I am glad to have seen it and I enjoyed the journey we went on with Paul, but it had some intangible thing lacking.
MPAA Rating PG-13
Release date 8/21/09
Time in minutes 101
Director Sophie Barthes
Studio MGM/Goldwyn
