Sounds Good

I recently watched a quirky little movie from last year called Cold Souls. Paul Giamatti plays "himself," struggling with his performance in a theatrical production; he's getting too connected with the role. Help comes when he learns of a service that will extract your soul and place it in storage, freeing one up from the burdens of day to day life. He undergoes the procedure only to find himself even more unhappy with his soulless performance. But restoring his own soul becomes complicated when he gets mixed up with an illegal underground Russian soul trade.

If this all sounds rather Being John Malkovich to you... well, it is. Or at least, it wants very much to be that. The movie makes stabs at bizarre humor, emotional pathos, black comedy, and existential philosophy. The trouble is, it all sounds much better on paper than it actually ends up being in practice.

There's just something that feels more "forced" than "odd" about the humor. The points the story tries to make about the human soul are rather superficial and uninteresting. The characters are more strange than deep. The whole is considerably less than the sum of the parts.

But the movie isn't a complete loss. Paul Giamatti's performance is really excellent. He mines humor ably from the lunacy of the situations, but his real triumph here is playing a struggling actor. At various point in the movie, we get to see him perform excerpts from the play he's starring in. We get him sadly conflicted about the role; later we see him comically disconnected from it after the extraction of his soul; finally we see a heart-breaking performance as he totally connects with the material. Each version is skilled and nuanced, and completely effective even without any of the rest of the actual play there to provide context. It may not seem like a compliment, given that he's playing "himself," but this is one of Paul Giamatti's best performances.

But unfortunately, it's for a movie that sounds much more clever than it actually is. I was disappointed overall, and would only rate Cold Souls a C-.