Paul Giamatti Does More With Less in ‘Cold Souls’

Rating: 4.0/5.0

CHICAGO – How is the best way to discover the elusiveness of the soul? For Paul Giamatti, playing himself, the key is to store the legendary organ into the deep freeze, in his new absurdist comedy, “Cold Souls.”

In what has to be one of the great challenges of naturalistic acting, Giamatti plays a character named Paul Giamatti, frantically trying to channel the depths of his new stage role as Anton Chekov’s “Uncle Vanya.”

Paul Giamatti Goes Through the Extraction Process in ‘Cold Souls’ Photo credit: Adam Bell for Samuel Goldwyn Films

Perplexed by the evasive character of the melancholy physician, Giamatti seeks a way to plumb a new sensibility out of a performance he can’t quite grasp. The chance encounter with an ad in a magazine discovers a clinic that can actually remove a person’s soul.

Emboldened by this information, Giamatti visits the facility and goes through the soul extraction – the form of it is incongruously shaped like a chick pea – and starts a journey of epic and life challenging proportions.

Through a series of maneuvering, which involves a subplot of Russian “mules” ingesting souls back and forth for an underground black market, Giamatti ends up with a poet’s soul (excellent for Vanya) while his spiritual body part winds up in a soul sweat shop back in the USSR. Claiming his essence once again will take a little traveling and a lot of mystical searching.

David Strathairn as Dr. Flintstein in ‘Cold Souls’ Photo credit: Adam Bell for Samuel Goldwyn Films

Giamatti turns in another stellar performance playing the “character” of himself. His performing decisions regarding the actions within his states of being – soulless, with a different soul and everywhere in between – is a high wire variation in mood exposition. For example, highly comic are his attempts to do Vanya without a soul, with the excitable Paul literally leaping out of his own skin.

Essential to the narrative is the Russian sidebar, where the mysterious mule named Nina (Dina Korzin) perfects an icy chill equal to winter there. All the chaos of yet another short supply of goods, in this case souls, plays out in the dreary landscape of St. Petersberg. It is the Russia that we expect, and the exaggeration lends a distinct atmosphere to the story’s gray area.

Writer/director Sophie Barthes sets up a great sequence where Giamatti’s soul ends up in a Russian actress (the procurers lie and tell her it’s Al Pacino). He then observes her enjoying his essence in a way that he can’t understand. His eyes seem to flicker and his usual hang dog expression is intensified with a surface tonality that immediately evokes empathy.

The satire of America’s feel-good solutions – soul extraction and psychotropic drugs seem not-too-subtly linked – are played through the starkness of the clinic and Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn) with gleaming sterility. The familiar vision of Russia is offered as a sharply defined contrast to the clinic, but both sides of the fence seem equally discombobulated.

The film also candidly offers a meditation on the meaning and essence of the soul. The needle-like jab of representing it like a chick pea, for example, implies that trying to give definition to what is out of reach could be a fool’s errand.

Even with a questionable and open-ended conclusion, this pondering of the soul is the victory in this film…and Paul Giamatti becomes the standard bearer.

By PATRICK McDONALD Staff Writer HollywoodChicago.com pat@hollywoodchicago.com