Movie: Cold Souls

The idea of “Cold Souls” is more enjoyable than the actual execution, and that is too bad. It’s a story about extracting souls and putting them to the side for a short while, and having an actor like Paul Giamatti play himself in this wild premise. Yeah, it’s a little like “Being John Malkovich” with a mix of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and a dash of Woody Allen’s “Sleeper,” but there’s a distinct reason for that.

You see, at the question-and-answer session with the writer/director Sophie Barthes at the world premiere last month at the Los Angeles Film Festival, she revealed that it was a dream about Woody Allen that inspired this story. She said she uses her dreams a lot in her work, and this one was very vivid. She dreamt about Woody Allen who decided to put his soul in a compartment. He got into an MRI-like silver tube and then he popped out and saw that his soul was in a little container and looked like a chickpea. He was very upset.

Now, although she knew it was unlikely that Woody Allen would ever appear in her movie, she wrote the screenplay anyway and then saw Giamatti in a film and became obsessed with him playing the role. She met him at a party and (they both say) they were a bit drunk, and she told him about the film and he agreed to do it.

Lauren Ambrose and Paul Giamatti star in the dreamy "Cold Souls."

Giamatti was at the debut screening too, along with co-star Dina Korzun, who plays a Russian “soul smuggler” who takes people’s souls and sells them back to people in Russia. Giamatti quipped that he didn’t think he had a soul, and the director pointed out that she was in the process of selling hers to Hollywood.

The film was made on a very small budget and it has few special effects. It is happening in the very near future, when Giamatti is reading an article in “The New Yorker” and he is intrigued by a new science article about people who are temporarily storing their souls in a little box at a bank-like vault and living without one for a short while. Like Botox, everyone is doing it, and Giamatti begins wondering what it is like.

The concept is intriguing. What could a person be like without a soul? Even more interesting, what would an actor be like without one? Why do people do it? Well, they say it is freeing. People find themselves without concerns, without worries, and without inhibitions. Not surprisingly, that’s an attractive scenario for an actor, and Giamatti is sort of having an actor’s block while working on a revival of “Uncle Vanya,” the heavy Russian play by Anton Chekhov.

He’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown. So he heads to a rather sterile office on Roosevelt Island where David Strathairn plays the guy in charge of the Soul Storage company. He explains the process and the limited health dangers, and of course, there’s an easy finance plan. When the soul is extracted, the actor is shocked to see a garbanzo bean in a little box. OK, it’s a chickpea.

Paul Giamatti finds life pretty odd in "Cold Souls."

Giamatti without a soul is uncomfortably funny. It’s most notable during his show rehearsals in his wildly diverse interpretations of “Uncle Vanya” which shocks his director and co-star. His wife (played by Emily Watson who is not his wife in real life), notices that something very, very weird is going on with him, so she confronts him. Her face contorts into true horror as he slowly confesses that he “extracted and stored” his soul. “Oh, but I still do have a percent of it,” he explains. She’s mostly disturbed that it took her so long to figure out that he’s missing it.

When he realizes that his acting isn’t improving without his soul, and his wife isn’t happy about the idea at all, he tries to get it back, only to discover that a ruthless “soul smuggler” and a sexy “soul mule” (Dina Korzun) have stolen the actor’s soul and smuggled it to Russia. Giamatti seeks out his soul, and confronts the smugglers, as well as “soul donors” who need some quick money. Some of the poor souls in Russia long for theirs back, but the ruthless smugglers won’t give it to them.

The tone of the film shifts to a chase, after Giamatti finds out that his soul is stolen and he aims to go find it. The story is unnecessarily complex, and many of the scenes seem redundant. The acting is uneven, and it’s hard to play against someone as talented as Giamatti.

If you’re not going in with too many expectations, and want something that is intriguing, entertaining, and thought-provoking when you go to the movies, then this is a good choice. It’s a bit more adult than FBI-trained guinea pigs, and even that not-so-great Adam Sandler movie

Rated: PG-13
Stars: Paul Giamatti, Emily Watson, Lauren Ambrose, David Strathairn, Dina Korzun, Katheryn Winnick, Sergey Kolesnikov
Director: Sophie Barthes

Studio/Official Site: http://www.coldsoulsthemovie.com