Alternate Best Actor 2009: Paul Giamatti in Cold Souls

Paul Giamatti did not receive an Oscar nomination for portraying himself in Cold Souls. 

Cold Souls depicts the complications involving a service that will remove and replace souls. 

That concept and the fact that Paul Giamatti is playing himself probably suggests two things, that the filmmaker probably was heavily influenced by Charlie Kaufman and two those that sound like potentially fun concepts...sadly you'd be wrong on the latter. Paul Giamatti plays Paul Giamatti, but evidently, he was well cast in films like Sideways, because apparently, Giamatti is also a rather neurotic, befuddled, and often exasperated man, at least according to the portrayal of himself. Giamatti is doing the thing he's known for here, and I suppose there is a reason he's known for it because he is good at it. Of course, playing "himself" you'd hope he'd be good at it, but regardless, he does engage on a basic level and you almost instantly are granted a sense of a man stuck on the role of Uncle Vanya, which I don't know I like the play but between this and Drive My Car, perhaps one needs to just avoid it all that emotional turmoil. Anyway due to the role though, Giamatti takes the rash choice of having his soul removed after learning of the service, of course making no note that the technician looks an awful lot like David Straithain. And I think in a way this is where you get one of the weaknesses of the film, which is it really doesn't find too much depth and really not much fun in the concept of seeing the now soulless Giamatti interact with the world. He's just kind of more distant and more blunt. I don't have anything against the way Giamatti is playing this, but in a way, there's just not enough to what could be a far more interesting idea than what we get here. 

The next step of misused potential is when Giamatti finds he can borrow souls and takes on a Russian poet. This makes the slight change of him being more neurotic and upset. Giamatti is good at playing up their already innate desperation of himself and just putting it up that much more. Showing this both as the man desperate around his wife (Emily Watson), but also becomes overly passionate now as a performer. Giamatti becoming this man who is breaking a bit at the seams. So much that he has to bring the soul back due to the pressure of it all. And again I will say Giamatti is good at being able to portray this emotional desperation and exasperation. You instantly understand the plight of his anxiety and he is effective. Again though I think the film is less than what it could be because it doesn't draw this out or have Giamatti take it towards any real depth. That is a criticism of the film, not his performance, that sells what he is given, even if I wanted him to be given a lot more. There's just only the amount we get which falls into a little bit of the shades of a better performance from Giamatti. Not that what Giamatti is doing is ever less than good, he just got to do more with very similar ideas to something like Sideways. And the whole it being Paul Giamatti strangely really functions largely for plot purposes and we don't get much in terms of Giamatti getting to really play on his image, or even have fun with it. You could've just made him an actor with a different name and the film wouldn't have changed. 

The film only gets more perfunctory in its third act when Giamatti finds that his soul has gotten lost in a black market soul market involving Russians, again all concepts that sound more interesting than they are actually realized here. Including the soul mule Nina (Dina Korzun), who is a very underutilized but interesting actress, who sadly is underutilized here as well. They develop a decent chemistry but are kind of meaningless except take that she's probably a fan of Giamatti's work and wants to help him. They're natural together, making it a bigger shame that the film really struggles to do more with them than a rudimentary recovery plot that has little emotional stakes despite souls being on the line. This includes Nina to helping him find his soul and recovering by looking inward, something he refused to do initially. A scene that again, is a lot less than the idea, where we see Giamatti looking around his soul. His reactions speak to some kind of fascination and reflection, that delivers as much as he can, despite the actual images not being terribly interesting. Nor is the denouement of Giamatti becoming whole again and learning from his experience. No fault to Giamatti who plays the comfort in the man, and is still concerned for Nina who helped him, but again it just doesn't add up to anything more than just fine. This is a real shame as everything Giamatti is doing here is good, it just is in service to a film that is nothing but potential, unrealized potential. Leaving Giamatti as someone who does give some life to the film, but in a way that makes it only all the more frustrating. As Giamatti is ready to go where the film will take him, sadly it never takes him anywhere interesting.