If anyone looks as if he might be in the possession of a troubled soul, it’s the actor Paul Giamatti. With his doubting eyes and gently defeated posture, he tends to come across as a man carrying a burden, though one not necessarily or wholly of his making. You can almost see the distress resting heavy and hard on his sloped shoulders, pushing out against his ovoid head, tugging at his lower eyelids and worrying his lips.
In Cold Souls, a story about life’s anguished weight, Giamatti plays a role for which he is exceptionally, perhaps even uniquely qualified: an actor named Paul Giamatti, thereafter known as Paul. When the movie opens, Paul is rehearsing a scene from Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya with obvious effort and concentration. “I’m a madman,” he proclaims. “I’m 47 years old.” It’s the final act of the play and Uncle Vanya is loudly expressing his vast disappointment. If only, he continues (and here the translation differs from other versions), “If I could only live what’s left in a different way.” In the play the next voice is that of his friend, a doctor, who, with palpable irritation, tells Vanya to shut it.
The next speaker in the film, though, is Paul himself, who angrily cuts off the rehearsal. Uncle Vanya is, among other things, about disappointed lives and thwarted desires and the continuing performances we call our lives. In many respects the same holds true for Cold Souls, an ambitious, elegantly shot, tonally cool first feature written and directed by Sophie Barthes that shows hints of Stanley Kubrick and Charlie Kaufman both. Yet unlike Vanya, the on-screen character called Paul Giamatti, who may or may not be similar to the public figure — the versatile, heroically ordinary-looking actor from films like Sideways and the HBO series John Adams — doesn’t appear to have much to regret.
He lives comfortably and apparently with some happiness with his beautiful wife, Claire (Emily Watson). He has an agent who phones him rather than the reverse. And he’s playing Uncle Vanya in a New York production, a plum gig. But something is troubling Paul, gnawing at him and eroding his performance, or so he believes. It’s not a tragedy, the theater director (Michael Tucker) kindly reminds him after Paul brings rehearsals to an abrupt, angrily frustrated stop. Yet the play isn’t a comedy either. It’s something in between, something like life, a blurring that thwarts Paul. His already rounded shoulders and bent head droop even further. And then he does something that every artist should be wary of: He listens to his agent.
The agent points toward a possible solution to Paul’s woes: Soul Storage, a company that extracts and stores souls, and on the conveniently close Roosevelt Island, no less. It’s a preposterous hook, of course, but Barthes introduces her absurd premise with deadpan restraint. In this she has great help from the dryly funny David Strathairn as doctor Flintstein, who runs the company with his assistant, Stephanie (an underused, decorative Lauren Ambrose). With little ado Flintstein persuades Paul to relinquish his soul in a swift, painless process that extracts it as if it were a zit. Afterward Paul is horrified to discover that his soul looks — and, as he rattles it inside its glass container, sounds — exactly like a chickpea.
“How can such a tiny thing feel so heavy?” Flintstein marvels. In Uncle Vanya the heaviness is unbearable, essential, inescapable: “We must go on living,” a character says with wrenching finality. Barthes more or less comes to the same conclusion, but she complicates her film in ways that suggest she has trouble accepting such a seemingly modest (say, chickpea-size) conclusion. And so, early on, she introduces Paul’s narrative counterpart, Nina (Dina Korzun), a beautiful melancholic who smuggles black-market Russian souls into the US. Like Paul, Nina is a performer (she passes through immigration using counterfeit fingerprints) and overburdened with soul, in this case the traces of smuggled souls that linger in her memory like the flickering images from barely remembered old movies.
Initially united only through the editing that toggles between them, Paul and Nina eventually meet in person. There is much to admire in their scenes together, particularly after Paul’s soul has gone amusingly if not tragically missing in Russia. There he finds a soap-opera star who yearns for the soul of Al Pacino (a very good Katheryn Winnick) and witnesses desperate people selling the most intimate part of their being. He also looks into his own soul, and while it brings tears to his eyes, it, much like the Russian subplot, proves disappointingly banal, which might be true to life but is an artistic letdown. In this attractive, smart-enough, finally un-brave movie Barthes peeks at the dark comedy of the soul only to beat a quick, pre-emptive retreat.
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