Cold Souls

Cold Souls

101 Minutes

Cold Souls is a comedy about the concept of souls, a magical realist pseudo sci-fi revolving around a company that provides the service of extracting and keeping in cold storage the ineffable essences of people who feel burdened by them. Paul Giamatti, playing himself, is struggling during his rehearsals for a stage production of Uncle Vanya – he feels burdened somehow, unable to perform. His director gives him a New Yorker article (and really, who learns about new technological developments from the New Yorker?) about a company called the Soul Storage Company, who are offering the opportunity for people to unburden themselves of their spiritual baggage.

If it all sounds a bit Charlie Kaufman-esque, well, it’s really not. It lacks the imagination, and the willingness, to really explore the meaning of its premise. Even if his films deal with specific subjects – identity, memory, obsession – all of them feel more like springboards; foundational premises for earnest attempts at exploring the Meaning of Life. Cold Souls feels more like a springboard for extending an already thin premise into a feature film. Here are two running jokes from the film: Paul Giamatti’s soul, once extracted, is the size and shape of a chickpea, and he really doesn’t want it to be stored in the company’s NEW JERSEY warehouse!!

Giamatti’s performance is typically twitchy and, like the script, doesn’t communicate much beyond a sense of general malaise. He felt awful before he got his soul taken out and then, afterwards, he continued to feel awful. What change has been made? That his performance in Uncle Vanya grows hokier doesn’t have any tangible link to his procedure. Thankfully, the doctor at the company that does the soul extraction has no idea what a soul actually is and says so, so that should be pretty relieving to anyone hoping to get some actual metaphysical inquiry out of this movie. It opens with a quote from Descartes: “The soul has its principal seat in the small gland located in the middle of the brain.” Imagine if it had done something with it! What if our sense of “soul” was just some ugly little squelch, a physical function hidden away in a deep recess of the brain? Wouldn’t that be a lot more interesting, as far as beginning to broach the subject of sense of self, than the shrug of the shoulders that Cold Souls offers us?

The film gets a little more interesting (and unnecessarily bloated, but never look a gift horse in the mouth) when the subject of Russian soul mules enters the equation and we start following Nina (Forty Shades of Blue’s excellent Dina Korzun) around as she flies back and forth between Russia and New York, bringing (paid-for) Russian souls over to be kept in storage for the use of any New Yorkers who may want to try on a different persona. Giamatti eventually wants to try on the soul of a Russian poet, and Nina ganks his for a Russian mobster’s girlfriend who wants to be a great actress and thinks she’s getting Al Pacino implanted in her. I’m worried I’m making this sound funnier than it is, but I promise it’s better in the abstract. Korzun has a real sense of alienation and blankness about her, perfectly in service of the idea that, as she continues to extract and implant them, the souls start leaving behind residue, obliterating any shot she has at fully restoring herself. Still, as an illustration of how this movie has no sense of what it wants to say, Giamatti eventually tracks Nina down by zeroing in on some image flashes in his head of a hotel that she always stays at in New York and he winds up going to her. Meanwhile, the Russian girlfriend can’t even tell she doesn’t have Al Pacino’s soul. So there you go. When Paul Giamatti first has his soul extracted and the doctor asks him how he feels, he tells him he’s great. As the movie wears on, he starts to feel something else: “Light, empty, bored.” Dude, I know!

by Andrei Alupului