Cold Souls

By: Alex Gallo-Brown

At first glance, Cold Souls might seem to be a cheap knockoff of Charlie Kaufman a la Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Helmed by first-time writer-director Sophie Barthes, the film stars Paul Giamatti as a paunchy, bespectacled actor of the same name who, stricken with actor’s block midway through rehearsals for his new play, decides to stash his soul awhile with a creepily upbeat doctor named Dr. Flintstein (played to perfection by David Strathairn). From such a premise, one fully expects Kaufman-esque comic surrealism and veiled potshots at American society. What one does not entirely anticipate, and what Cold Souls manages to deliver (in addition to Kaufman-esque comic surrealism and veiled potshots at American society) is a surprisingly subtle, emotionally nuanced meditation on the human condition itself.

The movie opens with Giamatti in rehearsals for a new production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, chewing the scenery to shreds.

“Paul, this is supposed to be a comedy,” pleads the director.

At home, Giamatti, shrunken and depressed, is alerted by his agent to an article in The New Yorker about a “soul storage” company located on Roosevelt Island. “Are New Yorkers carrying too heavy a load?” the article asks. Giamatti certainly is. The next day, reluctantly (and somewhat shamefully), he treks out to the island to gather more information.

What ensues could easily be played as absurdist farce, and yet the film, both thematically and aesthetically, most often imparts a tone of comic melancholy. (Barthes’s cinematographer is Andrij Parekh, who also shot Ryan Fleck’s Half-Nelson.) In an effort to rehabilitate his acting chops, Giamatti has his soul removed and stored in a glass jar at Dr. Flintstein’s facility. It looks, in what becomes a recurring joke, somewhat like a chickpea. He just wants to finish the play, he tells the doctor, and himself. Sans soul, however, Giamatti is unable to find the emotional core, shall we say, of his character: the self-pitying Uncle Vanya becomes a bright and vacuous lecher. Giamatti also develops an unseemly compulsion for crunchy foods — one of the funniest scenes in the movie is watching Giamatti, out to dinner with friends, munch away at celery sticks in complete oblivion to his surroundings — and, according to his wife (played by Emily Watson), he “smells weird.” In Barthes’s world, the consequences of storing one’s soul seem less existential than banal.

About this time, we’re introduced to Nina (Dina Korzun), a Russian “soul mule” who harvests souls in her home country and transports them to America for cash. Because a soul won’t survive in storage at high altitude, she has them embedded into her own body first and then removed in New York by Dr. Flintstein. Because the procedure only removes 95% of the soul, and the fragments accrete over time, accumulating dangerously within the body, Nina doesn’t look well — she has, in fact, the peaked, ragged countenance of a junkie. Although the film isn’t specifically an allegory for the sex trade, it isn’t too difficult to connect the dots. Nina, as played by Korzun, could be a character straight out of the Dardenne brothers.

To placate her boss’s wife — a vapid, Russian soap opera star with grandiose acting ambitions — Nina steals the only actor’s soul in Flintstein’s database — Giamatti’s — and jets back to Russia. Her theft coincides with Giamatti’s confession to his wife. Concluding that the weight of difficult emotion is preferable to no emotion at all, Giamatti embarks on a trip to Russia to recover his soul.

What makes Cold Souls a worthwhile film, if not a deeply profound one, is its ability to straddle the line between realism and surrealism and its refusal to sink into ironic meta-narrative or to reach for heights that are simply beyond its means, as in the case of the most recent Charlie Kaufman disappointment, Synechdoche, New York. This is Giamatti’s movie as much as it is Barthes’s — much more than Being John Malkovich was Malkovich’s — and though his subtle, versatile performance isn’t always distinguishable from previous turns in Sideways or American Splendor, it is certainly his own.