Cold Souls
Strangely moving, yet darkly comic. When we first come across Paul Giamatti’s character, also named Paul Giamatti and also an actor, he is having difficulty getting his head around a Chekhov play that he has become embroiled in to such an extent that it is making him miserable and confused.
Perhaps in a twisted turn of fate, he gets a call from a friend about an article in the New Yorker about a company who store souls. Thinking that he could well do without the trouble caused by his own soul, and a natural inclination to be curious,
Paul decides to go and check it out. Unburdening his soul, he hopes, will free him to a certain extent, to feel less drawn into his current acting role and enable him to find some distance between himself and the character he is playing.
He meets Doctor Flintstein, played delightfully smoothly and ever so slightly insidiously by David Strathairn, who sells his services with just enough pitch to convince Paul to part with his soul. Whilst Paul cannot wait to be rid of the source of his angst and wracking misery, he is still in two minds. It seems he is more attached to his soul than he would like to admit.
. It is only at this point that we begin to understand the ugly underbelly of the procedure. To tell you much more would ruin an interesting plot for you, so I won’t go into too much detail, but there is much more to soul storage than at first meets the eye.
Wilfully difficult to pigeon-hole, ‘Cold Souls’ is an odd trip, to be sure.
Failing to fall into any comfortable niche, it does have a habit of leaving the viewer lost and delighted in equal measure. A concept so entirely alien to everybody is always going to be difficult to grasp, but as a personal story, Paul’s emotional and mental journey is captivating, mostly compelling and performed admirably by Giamatti, who delivers a quite stunning performance at times, but falls foul of having to perform emotionally in a body that is not supposed to be bereft of any such thing.
With some truly fantastic(al) moments that will make you laugh out loud, it does hit some darkly sardonic highs, though you do have to question the characters responses to a completely immeasurable state of mind.
Nonetheless, the deed will be done and on the same afternoon, Paul emerges from his surgery, performed in what looks like a clinical, toilet-rolled bubble of space-age bells and whistles, an apparently new man. What follows in Flintstein’s office is brilliantly funny and almost believable as an incredulous Paul suffers from soul-envy. Still, Paul leaves his chick-pea soul in the care of the storage company in question and goes back to his life of acting and family, seemingly released from the burdens and bonds that emotional constraints were bearing upon him so heavily.
When his work starts to suffer, he begins to understand that having no soul can be detrimental to his performance, even if he is starting to feel better, having had none of the mood swings or dark thoughts that had plagued him pre soul removal. His director can see the change in him, even if he cannot understand the reasons for the change. So he returns to Dr Flintstein.
So much so that it is difficult to praise it too highly when the opinion of a performance of a character is more important than the actual response of a character put in that position. To wit, how can you perform a reaction to something that has never, ever been reacted to before? We may never have been to Pandora, but we can still act out the wonder it is to be surprised by what we witness. This, however, is altogether different and infinitely more difficult.
As talented as Giamatti undoubtedly is, and no matter how much I may love his work, I have yet to decide if he has managed to pull this one off.
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