Honolulu Weekly

Cold Souls posits that the soul can be removed from the human body, thus, alleviating any psychic burdens the person is suffering. The talented actor Paul Giamatti (playing himself in this meta-comedy), star of such films like Sideways and American Splendor, is having issues with his latest role in a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. He reads an article about the practice of soul storage in the New Yorker and decides that’s the route he wants to take to improve his performance, as well as his other everyday neuroses. As he puts it, “I don’t want to be happy; I just don’t want to suffer.”

With the help of the whacky-named Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn) and his iPod-white laboratory, Giamatti has his soul extracted and placed in a glass cylinder. The human soul takes many forms–Giamatti’s looks like a chickpea.

For a while, everything seems to be working, with only occasional Asperger’s-like moments of conversational inappropriateness, but soon, Giamatti finds himself close to being fired from the Chekhov production due to being on an entirely different wavelength than his co-stars. He gets the soul of a Russian poet transplanted into his system. Then things go really wrong.

Giamatti has the time of his life playing himself here and while the device sounds Malkovich-esque on paper, the results are totally different. In fact, unlike the aforementioned Spike Jonze classic, there is no real reliance on Giamatti himself–the main part could have been any other recognizable, semi-neurotic performer. Still, the actor turns in a finely observant, parodic, self-important, and ultimately, touching version of “himself.”

David Strathairn is hilarious keeping a straight, sincere face as the enthusiastic head of Soul Storage. He’s at his funniest delivering such lines of incredulity as “The soul is a mystery,” while managing to appear to genuinely believe it. And a scene between him and Giamatti scrambling on the floor to look for that chickpea of a soul is a subtly timed masterpiece of editing and quiet slapstick. Also hilarious are sight gags featuring Giamatti blow-drying a furry hat, munching celery sticks and simply playing with the lid of a bathroom trashcan.

Emily Watson plays Giamatti’s exasperated wife Claire with watery eyes and fretful frowns, but the real female find is Russian actress Dina Korzun as Nina, a soul mule, trafficking black market souls from Russia to the U.S. in her system. While her storyline lends the film an unnecessary criminal subplot tangent to pad out the runtime, her performance is genuinely haunting.

Fragments of other people’s lives remain as residual particles within her and she is warned that if she undergoes too many transfusions and extractions, the process will eventually cause her to be unable to keep her own soul. She develops a connection with Giamatti while transporting his soul and eventually ends up helping him when a spoiled St. Petersburg soap opera actress steals his soul (the young woman actually thinks the chickpea-soul belongs to Al Pacino).

This is writer-director Sophie Barthes’s debut feature-length film and as inventive as the proceedings are, Cold Souls seems to run out of steam with its premise towards the third act, getting bogged down with confrontations with black market gangsters. The film seems to want to ask deeper existential questions in between its moments of funny like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but barely manages to scratch the surface of its scientific issues. What peculiarities accompany prolonged soullessness? What happens to a soul when the “donor” dies? The questions are raised, but they are not answered. There is also a logic quandary within the plot: why have replacement souls on hand at the lab when the original intent of “unburdening made easy” was to be soul-less in the first place?

Once Cold Souls is over, its plot holes may leave more questions than answers, but it’s definitely a sleeper comedy worth trekking out for.