Cold Souls

City Paper Grade: C+

by Shaun Brady

[ CITY PAPER GRADE: C+ ]

Paul Giamatti plays "Paul Giamatti" in Sophie Barthes' debut, Cold Souls. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Paul Giamatti plays Paul Giamatti — wait, scratch that. Paul Giamatti plays "Paul Giamatti" in Sophie Barthes' navel-gazing debut comedy. There's a significant difference there, as the film hinges on Giamatti's screen image, the world-weary crank, hunched over under the weight of his frustrations. Here, it's his role in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya that's weighing on his mind, the character's own tribulations added to his own, driving the actor to the brink of a meltdown.

Appropriately for an existentially aggravated intellectual, an answer comes via the pages of The New Yorker, which features a piece on Soul Storage, a company that extracts, stores and deals in souls from its facility on Roosevelt Island. The process is explained in amusingly mundane directness by David Strathairn as Dr. Flintstein, a mad scientist recast as used-car salesman, smoothly dismissing concerns about his relatively untested technique while offhandedly mentioning how much of his inventory is smuggled in from Russia.

Paul's story is told in parallel with the adventures of one of these "soul mules," Nina (Dina Korzun), who has the remnants of countless souls accumulating in her own system. The story was inspired by a dream in which Woody Allen discovers his soul to be the size of a chickpea; Giamatti is certainly apt as a Woody substitute, but one can't help wonder what neurotic insights Allen might have gleaned from the premise in his prime. Barthes' exercise in Being Charlie Kaufman, however, seems so concerned with grounding its strangeness in a banal reality that its metaphysics are reduced to a MacGuffin.

Giamatti ekes laughs from his soulless state, blank-eyed and affectless, but Barthes shies away from exploring his home life, wasting Emily Watson as his wife. But once he finally gets a glimpse into his own soul, the result is a disappointing film-school dream sequence, divorced from any relevance to the character. Which is ultimately the most disappointing aspect of this film; an effective performance by Paul Giamatti is squandered on the unrewarding soul of "Paul Giamatti."