(Madman)

Soul man

Paul Giamatti plays himself in Cold Souls, struggling through rehearsals for a Russian play because he’s too affected by the work and caught up in the emotion. Until, that is, he hears of Soul Storage via an article in the New Yorker, a company who promise to remove your troubled soul and put it on ice while you go through your life free of guilt, doubt, angst and other troubling first-world problems. They even offer trades, letting you choose a replacement from a variety of spirits shipped in on the cheap from Russia. Director Sophie Barthes loves montages, telling a lot of this unusual story in jumbles of bite-size pieces, showing Giamatti and his perfectly hangdog face staring off into the distance or contemplating the scenery. She’s halfway between Woody Allen and Charlie Kaufman, but without reaching the heights of either at their best. The central idea, and Giamatti’s central performance, are both great but feel wasted. There’s potentially rich satire in the idea of Americans paying for a few weeks’ worth of complacent moral bankruptcy and there’s potential thrills in Giamatti’s eventual attempt to get his soul back from Russian mobsters after it goes astray, but Barthes resists letting this movie be more than just a little bit funny or having more than the tiniest touch of suspense, relying instead on more montages and staring. Perhaps appropriately, it feels hollow.

**˝

JODY MACGREGOR

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