Film festival hype… We swear the altitudes in Utah cut off circulation to the brain. You don’t want to do a review based on what others have said, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t say we’re fairly surprised to see writers we respect giving this film an easy pass.
And yes, even though Sundance ’09 favorite “Cold Souls” is not generally like a Charlie Kaufman film — as many have compared it to for basic explanatory purposes — there are similar existential themes that are undeniable (yet only one of these two writers really knows the architecture of drama–We’ll give you two guesses which one). However, “Cold Souls,” is all concept and a half-assed one at that, with zero clever follow-through or execution. At best, it’s low-rent Kaufman with not an ounce of spark or life (the wooden performances of female leads Dina Korzun and Katheryn Winnick don’t help either; also, who cast Lauren Ambrose as a receptionist who does nothing?)
Tedious and uninvolving, this Sophie Barthes picture tracks the life of actor Paul Giamatti (as played by Paul Giamatti, naturally; what a novel concept!) who’s going through some kind of existential life crisis that we learn far too little about throughout. Acting in a Russian play, he treats the text with despondent solemnity, over-acting and taking the material too much to heart. His soul and angst are apparently weighing him down so much that he cannot bear to act anymore. Yes, such a painful struggle. We all truly sympathize.
And really? there’s absolutely no reason why Paul Giamatti needs to play Paul Giamatti in this thing. It brings no level of extra humor or depth. He could simply played a fictional actor and it would have worked just as well which makes it seem like a dubious creative choice.
10 minutes later, after a humorless and laborious rehearsal, his agent conveniently notifies him — as a jest of course — that a New Yorker article has announced the existence of a soul storage facility that extracts the embodiment and essence of the human spirit and does away with it — the soul apparently well-known for creating an anchor of existential angst.
Perfect timing! This is evidently enough to float the narrative (only slightly more ridiculous would have been Giamatti finding the number written on a bathroom stall), because 10 minutes after that, Giamatti is at the cold storage facility being convinced to extract his soul by expert Dr. Flintstein (the fine David Straitham struggling with very sub-par material).
It’s almost unbelievable how little effort is put into conveying just how bleak and awful Giamatti’s existence really is. We’ve seem him struggle at a rehearsal, we see him dourly walk around his fancy, schmancy Manhattan apartment and seemingly moments later, he’s off to his cold soul storage quick fix (a thoughtless plot device to get this sucker moving?). Are these modern malaise doldrums that anyone is supposed to empathize with? Clearly, that hasn’t even occurred to the filmmaker.
Here’s the thing. “Cold Souls” is based on a dream that Barthes had about Woody Allen going to a soul extraction facility because life is weighing him down (or something similar to that), but it feels like, rather than dramatizing that story, she writes a collection of scenes that move from a) to b) without charisma, inventiveness or pulse.
Not particularly funny (nor half as clever as it thinks it is) “Cold Souls” plods along with negligible suspense and marginal conflict. By the time Giamatti’s essence (which evidently looks like a chickpea, why this is supposed to be remotely funny proves to be a mystery) is stolen by Russians trafficking human souls on the black market, we don’t really give a damn. We’re not even slightly invested in this character because the filmmaker is far too interested in moving a generic and perfunctory plot forward than she is in injecting any element of personality or energy into this pedestrian meta wannabe (the boilerplate, second-rate Jon Brion-like quirk score doesn’t help).
Of course, Giamatti’s frumpy, complainy character has a wife (Emily Watson, doing not much of anything), but she appears in all of but two brief, obligatory scenes and this decent cast can simply not elevate this half-baked, going-nowhere material.
Giamatti is surely recognized as one of the untouchables in the indie world, but he’s nothing but annoyingly one-note here. This feels like the third or fourth performance in a row where Giamatti has played to the edges of his range and he might want to get that Pacino-itis looked at before it becomes incurable.
Facile to state, but inexorably true, the grand irony of “Cold Souls,” is that it’s a soulless picture that’s practically DOA within the first 15-minutes of the film and the rest is an arduous, clock-watching slog, even at a brief 90 minutes. Meant to be “cold” you say? Congratulations, we guess. Best of luck with that.
One of the most damning things we can say was that we were so perturbed by this generic picture we couldn’t even sleep through it (though we tried). For all his tricks and conceits, at least Kaufman understood that the mechanics of surreality wouldn’t work without an emotional center to cling to. Everyone can identify with trying to forget the very potent desire to escape a case of burning heartbreak (“Eternal Sunshine of the yadda yadda”), but escaping yourself? There would seem to be some serious reasons why someone would choose to do this, but they’re heavily glossed over so the characters in this milieu can get to Russia already and the, ahem, hilarity can ensue.
How is an audience supposed to care if the filmmaker can’t bother to convey the spiritual burden resting on someone’s shoulders other than a few scenes of generic sweaty, discomfiture? Giamatti plays his woes as if he’s been kept on the phone with customer service for 30 minutes and or suffers from irritable bowel syndrome with few traces of genuine soul-crushing despondency.
To the filmmaker’s credit there is little by way of quirky cinematic tricks, time transposition or crazy camerawork or any other whimsical conceits that would have only reinforced the Gondry/Kaufman stereotyping critics have already foisted on it. It’s smart, preventative thinking on Barthes part, however it backfires: she goes so far in the opposite direction that the picture’s drab tone feels even more enervating and flat.
What favors did the filmmakers call in to get this insignificant picture off the ground and these actors involved? (it’s Barthes first feature film, and yes, her short film, “Happiness” was a 2007 Sundance Film Festival hit, again, lack of oxygen?? Is there a fascinating and creative script that somehow was lost in translation on the way to the screen? We’re baffled. Not terrible per se, but a thoughtless irritant with zero flicker or insight that’s simply not worth anyone’s time and makes us wonder what other less-mediocre indie scripts are sitting in drawers unproduced right now. [C-]
“Cold Souls” opens in limited release on August 7.
