Essential ennui

As with 1999's faux biopic, Being John Malkovich, Cold Souls explores the fictive goings-on of a second-rate star. Like Malkovich, Paul Giamatti is widely known, but hardly the sort of celebrity to attract a cult of personality. It is in fact more than a little strange to discover a film solely devoted to the psychic struggles of the star of The Lady in the Water (2006) and Sideways (2004). And yet, such peculiarity is fitting, as strange is just what Cold Souls sets out to be.

A dry comedy of the pitch-black variety, Cold Souls centers on Giamatti's angst over the difficulties of being an actor faced with a torturous role. His mood, health, sleep habits and general happiness are ruined by his pathological commitment to the method (he's that serious), and he casts about for some kind of relief that will ease his miserable existence.

At his agent's suggestion, Giamatti visits a clinic specializing in the extraction and storage of human souls. The clinic, a nebulous organization with underworld ties, is piloted by Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn), who blissfully proclaims the soul's unplumbed depths even as he reassures his patients the operations he performs are perfectly safe.

Having shed his soul after some initial reluctance, Giamatti finds he is actually much happier - or at least less depressed. But his acting suffers, and his marriage begins to come apart at the seams due to his inability to relate to other people and his disinterest in making love. Realizing that he may in fact require his essence to retain his livelihood, he returns to the clinic, and through a slowly unraveling series of bizarre events discovers a sinister black market trafficking in souls. Then it's a scramble to locate and reacquaint himself with the one and only version that truly belongs to him.

Though very clever on the whole, the story is only rarely funny, and the abstractness of the premise largely alienates the viewer, keeping us at arm's length by treating its subjects like insects on display rather than living, breathing human beings. Cold Souls is an apt title for the project (written and directed by relative newcomer Sophie Barthes), as the themes explored are sterile, free from emotion and clinical in the extreme. Anxiety is unpleasant, to be sure, and ennui is a common condition. But there are no solutions offered here, and such a close examination of these maladies cries out for justification.

The film's central theme seems to be an acknowledgement that there is nothing anyone can do to mitigate the difficulties of life; one must simply grin and bear it. For a film posing as an existentialist artifact, such indifferent cynicism is surprisingly adolescent.  

That said, Giamatti is no slouch as an actor, and Barthes' script gives him ample opportunity to parade his skills. As the lead in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (the play within the play, as it were), Giamatti demonstrates an astonishing range, working through different interpretations of the role due to the shifting status of his soul. Strathairn is his usual understated and competent self, lending the film its only genuine bits of levity.

The main problem with Cold Souls is that the epistemology of "soul extraction" is a nonstarter as a subject for popular entertainment. Barthes' musings on the potential side effects and psychic consequences of the fantastical procedure become tedious pretty quickly. Who cares if Giamatti feels empty inside because he has transformed his soul into a chickpea and locked it in a safe? Who cares if young soul courier Nina (Dina Korzun) is teetering on the brink of mental collapse as the result of contact with the essences and psyches of too many exploited customers? These are invented dilemmas without corollary in the real world, and, as such, they lack interest.

Violent self-pity is an unplayable emotion, despite the litany of failed artistic attempts in the past. When a character like the fictive Giamatti wallows in existential angst as unrelentingly as he does, the audience grows restless. It's an illustration of a counterintuitive dramatic truth - Giamatti cares so much about his private troubles that we become instinctively disinclined to bother with empathy. The inevitable result: bored souls.

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com