Transcendent and soulful


If you're familiar with my movie reviews, you know I'm a tremendous admirer of Paul Giamatti - the man can do no wrong in my estimation; I think he's one of the finest actors of our generation and certainly one of the most versatile - so when I heard about Cold Souls, a film in which he plays an actor named Paul Giamatti who, suffering under the unbearable weight of his tormented soul, decides to have it removed and placed in storage (but not in New Jersey, anywhere but New Jersey), I was expecting to hugely enjoy it, based on his performance alone.

What I hadn't expected was to discover a thrillingly gifted new filmmaker, Sophie Barthes, who manages to pull off the near-impossible with this, her first feature, by taking an absurd 'what if' plot and turning it into a stunningly thoughtful, deeply intelligent and magnificently subtle meditation on what it means to have a soul, to not have a soul and even to have someone else's.

In the hands of a less talented writer, Cold Souls could have been a disaster - a disaster with a magnificent, transcendent central performance from Giamatti (whom I'm convinced at this point is one of the greatest actors of all time) - but a disaster nonetheless. The concept is beyond tricky; it's the sort of plot I call a tightrope act, where the overall tone is everything, and once established, this tone has to be consistent throughout or the believability is shot.

Barthes succeeds brilliantly in this by never allowing the surrealistic goings-on to become a cheap joke; instead the situation, with its varying and creative ramifications, is played in dead earnestness, with unwavering commitment on the part of Giamatti and the rest of the cast (particularly Emily Watson as his wife, who senses something's different about Paul early on, in the scenes when he's operating soulless - there's a great exchange in bed where she touches his skin and says he feels 'scaly'. "Scaly?" he repeats incredulously, "Like a lizard?!?"). And it's because of this dead seriousness that the film in spots is hilariously funny - the humor comes naturally, out of the situations themselves, not through any contrivances; Barthes is already far too confident an artist for that – she clearly trusts her material and her actors, and it shows.

The result is a stunning experience that will resonate with you long after you leave the theater, if you're lucky enough to be able to see it in a theater, that is – the movie was slated to go from the film festivals direct to DVD, but right now it is playing in a few places and is supposed to open wider shortly, I've heard. Otherwise, get it on DVD the second it becomes available. Your soul will thank you.