Cold Souls (2009)

Directed by: Sophie Barthes
Starring: Paul Giamatti

**1/2

In 2002 Charlie Kaufman penned a great screenplay adaptation of The Orchid Thief called Adaptation. In this screenplay, Charlie Kaufman wrote himself in as the main character. Two years later, Kaufman penned an even greater screenplay in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in which some weird science allows one to have a part of their memory erased. What does all this have to do with Sophie Barthes' Cold Souls? Cold Souls does its part in combining the two, if only to setup what turns into a relatively uninteresting story more suitable for a Bond movie than a character study starring one of the best actors working today.

In Cold Souls, Paul Giamatti is himself, or a version of himself (who really knows?). He's stressed, anxious, nuerotic and struggling with his performance of Vanya. That is until he reads and article in the New Yorker and makes a visit to Dr. Flintstein played by David Strathairn (this films version of Dr. Mierzwiak played by Tom Wilkinson). Flinstein has developed a method to extract one's soul. Now his science isn't as specific as Mierzwiak's but it does seem to serve a purpose. Without one's soul, one can feel free, uninhibited and stress free. It takes an actor of Giamatti's caliber (the real Giamatti, not the one in the movie) to pull off the subtle differences of he with a soul and he without one. Giamatti does not disappoint as he's really yet to do. He understood the subtly for which the film was looking and he made much of the rest of the film worth watching.

The introduction to soul extraction is interesting as one would expect. If memory erasing is the backbone of one of the best films of the last decade then a version of that must at least be able to serve as the backbone of a decent one. Unfortunately, Flinstein's work has spawned something known as soul trafficking, practiced by the Russians. They use women who are implanted with other people's souls, then fly to Russia where those souls are again extracted and sold. There are aspects even of this part of the film that are interesting and well thought out but its so poorly executed that again, I felt like I was watching one of the bad Bond movies. I can only take so much unmotivated foreign intrigued.

I got the impression that first time writer, director (feature-wise) Sophie Barthes put too many eggs in one basket. Puns aside, she crafted an idea that souls could be extracted and people could live with another person's soul and executed that idea pretty effectively. It had to be at that point that she realized she perhaps had another short film and not the feature she had planned starring Paul Giamatti as Paul Giamatti. It takes more than a creative idea to make Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and writing a real life character into your movie does not make Adaptation.