Note: please "right-click" the links to open them in a new window or tab."Cold Souls," written and directed by Sophie Barthes, and featuring some great performances by Paul Giamatti, David Strathairn, and Emily Watson, is ultimately a piece of existential fluff, with some great ideas that were either too subtly developed, or not fully explored.
Giamatti is playing himself playing the title role in Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya," and it is weighing him down. His manager recommends a service that offers to extract your soul and store it for you. The manager has seen an ad about the service in The New Yorker. In fact, in real life -- not the movie -- The New Yorker briefly interviewed Giamatti about, well, souls.
After much agonizing ("soul-searching"?), Paul decides to store his soul during the two-week run of the play. I don't know the plot of "Uncle Vanya," and I think that would help. At any rate, without a soul, Giamatti's acting suffers, so he asks for it back. The problem is that the soul has gone missing, so he has to rent the soul of a "Russian poet" in the meantime. His performance in "Uncle Vanya" becomes very powerful and nuanced -- this was certainly a great acting exercise for Giamatti. And Strathairn is wonderful as the proprietor of the soul storage service.
"You could avoid sales tax if you chose to store your soul in our New Jersey warehouse," he tells Giamatti. Responding with a look of distaste bordering on disgust, Giamatti says something like, "New Jersey? No thank you. I don't know what would happen to my soul in New Jersey." One of the few bits of schtick offered by the movie.
The other part of the movie involves a black market in stolen souls. So, Giamatti has to go to St. Petersburg in Russia to get his soul back from a soap opera star who really wanted Al Pacino's soul instead. This could be a hilarious comedy of errors. Unfortunately, it turns Russian, and thus dark and tragic. And there's an unnecessary, or at least under-exploited, complication involving a soul "mule" -- the woman who illegally carries stolen souls back and forth between St. Petersburg and New York.
In the movie, Giamatti is married to a woman played by the English actress Emily Watson (who has a nothing role, but brings quite a bit of emotional depth to it, nonetheless), but he spends a lot of time with Nina, the Russian soul mule, and he seems to want to help her reform. The final scene in the movie is a medium-to-long shot that takes place at Coney Island, I think, where Giamatti silently catches up with Nina, who is walking on the beach looking lost and sad. We know that she carries the residue of the many souls she has smuggled. That's it.
I saw the movie in West Hollywood with my sidekick, "Eve," who found a number of inconsistencies in the plot. For example, the soap opera star's lover, the soul trafficking kingpin, is also Nina's boss and is portrayed as a jealous and fearsome person (think a Russian Pablo Escobar -- well, not that scary). But, when it comes time to drug the soap star and extract Giamatti's soul out of her, the Kingpin doesn't figure in.
Another thing that is implied, but not made clear, is that the soul of the Russian "poet" probably did not belong to a poet at all, but to an exploited factory worker. What happens to her soul when Giamatti's is returned to him? "Who can tell?" It seems to have vanished. There's a possible reason, which I won't tell you, but if we were going to have this faux-poet, we needed to know more about her -- much is implied, but little is spelled out.
So, the movie's plot was ultimately unsatisfying, but the performances are worth seeing. Unfortunately, the theater chain seems to be in collusion with Ms. Barthes in making the movie inaccessible. At our nearby theater, "Cold Souls" was only showing at noon and 10:00 p.m., which is why we had to see it about 25 miles away. There were only four other people in the theater with us at 4:30 on a Thursday afternoon.
It was actually a blessing to leave the San Gabriel foothills, though, because it was perhaps the hottest day of the year so far and a huge brush fire was billowing smoke into the air all day from Angeles Crest, behind La Canada-Flintridge, not far from our edenic abode.
