Review: Cold Souls

Deep shit, bro.

Cold Souls is a strange movie.  I can't decide whether its clever or just trying too hard to be existential.  Paul Giamatti is a fun actor to watch, but is it just too much when he's playing a kinda famous actor named Paul Giamatti?  You can make a sci-fi movie about real life ideas without rubbing it in our faces, guys.

Alright so Paul is this dude who's feeling depressed and out of it, partly because he's doing this crazy depressing Russian play that's really tough on him emotionally.  He's feeling crappy one day when his agent calls him and tells him to look at this article in the New Yorker about a company that can extract the soul from the body and put it in storage.

Mmmk.

Paul checks it out, and it turns out they're saying that removing your soul actually makes you feel lighter; it removes a great weight from your conscience.  Paul thinks this all sounds crazy, but what the hell.  If it's bad, he can always just put his soul back in his body and he'll be fine.  It's only for two weeks while he does the play, right?  What could go wrong?

Oh movie characters.  When will you learn that things that sound crazy-dumb usually are.  Life lesson:  if you are ever told that removing your soul from your body is a good idea, you are being shitted. This is a classic idea that always ends badly.  Just look at Liches, or if you're more pop cultural than that Voldemort.  Taking your soul out of your body is just stupid.  Classic symptoms include feeling empty, emotionless, scaley (as in lizard-like), and nothing at all.  That is, feeling nothing at all.  Look what happened to Bart Simpson - he felt anxious and empty.  Sliding doors stopped opening for him.  Crazy supernatural shit went down.  Yeah.

To no one's surprise but his own, this is exactly what happens to poor stupid Paul.  He feels empty, hollow.  I guess removing that intangible piece of yourself that makes you "you" rather than some other schmuck is a bad idea.  So what does he decide to do?  Rather than put himself back the way he was, he decides to "rent" the soul of a Russian poet.  Uh huh.  Because if feeling empty is bad, feeling full of something distinctly not you will feel great.  The movie itself compares this to sleeping with the person who's soul you now have in you.

There is a moment here that was very intriguing.  Paul is ranting about how it sucks to not have a soul when the doctor stops him and asks "have you felt a single bad thought since you extracted your soul?"  No.  "Have you felt anything at all in the past week?"  No.  This isn't exactly a good thing, but it is what Paul was trying to do.  He was trying to detach himself from his life and work, from his play.  It's a classic case of getting what you want but not realizing the full price that you paid.

What's going on with this movie?  It's obviously circling around the classic "what defines who we are" topic, but there's more to it than that.  The mule lady is so important to the story, and she's so good to Paul, what's being said when it turns out she can't ever get her own soul back?  Life is tragic, maybe.  Life can be tragic.

What's with the whole Russian theme?  I just don't know much about Russian history or culture to know what's going on there, but there's so much of it that it's got to symbolize something.  If anyone out there has ideas, let me know.

Then there's the movie poster.  Check it:

What does this tell us?  Well, Paul Giamatti is definitely in this movie.  I get the impression this movie is going to try and say something, probably about the soul - the abstractness implies that for me.  Abstract posters usually lead to thinky movies.  The Russian doll thing with his head... oh man.  Oh man!  The Russian motif is right there on the poster, albeit cleverly hidden.  WELL PLAYED, COLD SOULS.  WELL PLAYED.  Anyway, that makes me think about trying to get inside Paul's head.  We want to understand what's in there, but each layer is just more Paul.  As we go in there and look for him, we'll pass by all this other stuff that is also him.  And when we get there, it's just Paul.  He's there giving us a snarky glare.  That layer thing is important, too.  People are like onions, after all.  They have layers.

Why does Paul's soul look like a chickpea?  I think this is the part where we get a message about how something as wonderful and beautiful as the soul doesn't have to be big.  It can be as small and boring as a chickpea and still house all the essence of a human being.  Then you get obvious implications about what has happened to his soul when it's all withered out after the actress lady is done with it, and you get to make jokes about how some famous celebrity has a soul that looks like a charcoal.

I don't know, I feel like almost everything in this movie has been done before.  Souls are important, souls can be small and innocuous while still being beautiful, some people have good souls, some people have bad souls, everyone's soul is different, what happens to the soul when we die, what are people like when they don't have a soul, what does that imply about the nature of the soul, etc, etc.  It's just not new and not that innovative in its presentation.

I did like the laboratory scenes.  The sci-fi aspect of the movie was the perfect blend of wit and polish.

Also, someone get the directer a fucking steady-cam.  If you're filming Cloverfield, that's one thing.  You have an excuse for your shaky camera.  If you're filming a serious movie, your artistic statement about the uncertainty of reality and life is better left to the script and actors than to a technique that makes me queezy.

There were a couple of symbolic things I did like a lot.  The recurring shots of people standing looking out at the beach and into the ocean were good.  I like the use of the beach as sort of a dividing line between life and nothingness, between having a soul and not.  The other well done bits were the ones where we got a look into people's souls.  The cinematography was really good there, and being wide open to interpretation is something a soul should be.  The Russian poet's soul felt deeply tragic on some level.  I did feel longing and sorrow during that sequence, like I had once had hope but most of it had been beaten out of my by the crappy factor that I work in.

Paul's soul, too, is well done.  It feels so intimate.  He wants a son, or maybe his wife had a miscarriage, or both... He maybe wishes he was a kid again but is happy with where he's ended up.  Ultimately, he's content with whatever he came away with after looking into his soul.  I think that's the most important part of the movie.  It's the part that actually verged on powerful for me.  It's hard to really look into yourself, to give yourself a good examination.  It's not something you always want to do.  But it can help.  Coming to terms with yourself, or reconnecting with your soul as the movie puts it, can make you feel good about yourself.  Chances are you have a beautiful soul.  Let yourself into it.

...

Anyway, I did enjoy it.  Paul Giamatti is fun to watch.  Some of the soul stuff may be overdone, but it's still an interesting subject.  The sci-fi stuff is good, and there's some funny lines.  I don't get the Russian thing, and that might open up more understanding of the film.  Maybe it's supposed to add to the bleakness of the world that a soul can light up.  I think of Russian stuff as pretty bleak.

SAM'S VERDICT:  If you like Paul Giamatti or are feeling existential, jump on in.  The water is not fine, exacty, but full of existentialism and Paul Giamatti.

Also, just because I'm a filthy Joss Whedon whore, I'm going to go ahead and recommend Dollhouse here.  This is Whedon's most recent TV show, and it's dealing with a lot of the same ideas as this movie.  You know, who are we, and what makes a person a person.  Dollhouse starts out really, really, REALLY bad, but it picks up at episode 6.  If you can get your hands on the DVD boxed set, watch the original pilot, then read episode recaps of eps 1-5, maybe cherry-pick a couple out of there to get an idea for the show, then skip to episode 6 and go from there.  I stopped recommending the show a while back, but after seeing Epitaph One (a between seasons episode they shot for weird reasons), it's officially on my list of good shows.