Cold Souls
It’s not because Paul Giamatti, the actor, here
playing a version of himself, desires to be happy
that he avails of the services of a soul extractor, it’s rather that he
would like to be able to live without a feeling of concomitant angst Set in a
parallel version of the present, where the concept of soul extraction causes
never an eyebrow to raise whenever it’s mentioned, Cold Souls ultimately has the flavour of an actors’ workshop piece,
albeit a well-photographed and produced one. The central conceit, that souls
are extractable, storable and exchangeable (in their extracted state they’re
highly volatile at altitude, we are told) is never explained in a way that
jars, provided that the concept of the soul itself is familiar to you, which is
perhaps surprising given that it’s a relatively strange idea. Our apparent
familiarity with the implications of this hypothetical practice is a sign that
the writers have created a work that doesn’t seek to provide a significant
challenge, but rather that the audience are accomplices by understanding.
Paul Giamatti, the actor playing the actor,
does a very good job, particularly when his character is rehearsing for Uncle Vanya. He’s not entirely
charismatic, and his slightly-too-intense-for-his-own-good persona doesn’t
differ a lot from his more well-known roles in Sideways and American
Splendor. Nonetheless, his physical expressions are mobile and accurate and
his performance here would make you want to see him in Uncle Vanya “for real”.
A quotation from Descartes, where he speculates
on the physical seat of the soul in the brain, prefigures proceedings. Here is
the foundation, that the soul has a physicality, for
the speculation that ensues. In the context, the suggestion that souls can have
weight out of proportion with their size, and that “most souls are dark in
colour”, doesn’t really surprise us. Neither is it great leap for us to
understand how an actor of Russian classical drama, once his soul has been
extracted, might exhibit a carefree abandon that simultaneously makes it
impossible for him to connect with the temperamental character that he plays.
From a logical standpoint, it’s difficult to understand why such effects of
soul extraction are apparently mutable. This, and similar sticky issues, are usually
explained away (i.e. “the soul is mysterious”) in a manner of a self-amending
game. Some might argue that this is inherent in all fiction, and that may be
true, it’s just that it seems particularly inherent in Cold Souls.
Cold Souls is typically played for minor
laughs in what is for the most part a comfortable universe. We’re presented
with a fleshing-out of ideas that are not altogether foreign to us, and the
filmmakers do well to maintain our interest in this high-concept endeavour for
as long as they do. At the conclusion, an evening sunset over a beach dissolves
like a Rothko painting and that’s it. An interlude of playful questioning, of
life, of art, of acting, is over.