The Wardman Wire

Cold Souls is an entertaining watch, and amusing – though not hilarious, not especially satirical, and doing nothing very original. It’s a bit like Being John Malkovich crossed with Eternal Sunshine, and not quite as interesting as either.

Adam Bell / Samuel Goldwyn Films

Paul Giamatti plays himself. Exhausted with anxiety during rehearsals of Uncle Vanya (there’s a Woody Allenish feel about this, as about much of the film), he chances upon an article in the New Yorker about a new technique for lifting your psychic burdens through the extraction and storage of your soul. A soul which, in Paul Giamatti’s case, is the shape and size of a chick pea. But what if lightness starts to feel like emptiness, and you feel the need to restore your inner self? The actor finds that’s not as simple as advertised, in a world where anything can be trafficked. He must tangle with the Russian mafia in a literal struggle for his lost soul.

It’s entertaining enough. I’ve no complaint with Paul Giamatti, the support is pretty good from David Strathairn as the creepy clinician and Dina Korzun as an exhausted soul-mule, and Emily Watson is good in it too, as Giamatti’s wife. I think what makes Cold Souls a little disappointing, ultimately, is that it doesn’t do all that much, imaginatively, with the idea of being soulless or in possession of someone else’s soul. What would that be like? What would it do to you? There are jokes about losing your smell, and a good idea about the effect of trace fragments, but Cold Souls doesn’t really get much deeper into any of this. A pity.

Cold Souls is a likeable, well made, reasonable comedy of New York angst. It compares unfavourably though to a similar sort of film from earlier this year – the wilder and baggier, less accessible, but more serious, satisfying and imaginative Synecdoche, New York.