Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Souls and Selves
(Cold Souls, 9/09/09)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Sophie
Barthes' Cold Souls sounds reminiscent of Dead Souls—Nikolai
Gogol's classic novel about a con-man who goes around provincial Russia,
buying title to deceased serfs for tax purposes. We don't have overt
serfdom anymore but we do have our own kinds of misery, such as that
of rich, mopey, self-absorbed Hollywood actors (Paul Giamatti) who are
forced to live in their own skins. Barthes' movie imagines what would
happen if there were somebody, not unlike Gogol's shyster Chichikov,
who was willing to relieve us of our precious burdens.
Playing an actor named "Paul
Giamatti," Giamatti (Sideways, John Adams) is frustrated
in his preparation for playing the lead in a certain play by Chekhov.
His problem, it seems, is a certain heaviness of soul that forces to
identify too closely with Chekhov's self-pitying, frustrated Uncle Vanya.
He finds his solution—as everyone does—in a write-up in The
New Yorker: there's a certain doctor (David Strathairn) who extracts
his clients' souls and stores them in a secure, refrigerated facility
in Manhattan (or New Jersey, if the client prefers to avoid sales tax).
Cold Souls is a sort-of comedy, sort-of drama about what happens
when Giamatti doffs his weighty soul (which, alas, is chickpea-sized)
and runs headlong into the Russian-led international "soul trafficking"
market.
Now one can easily see the opportunities
for either making this in broad, high-concept style, as in the Adam
Sandler vehicle Click— e.g. "soulless in Hollywood,
ha ha, aren't we all?" The French-born Barthes has something more
self-consciously artful in mind, however. Something along the lines
of Charlie Kaufman, without whose scripts for Eternal Sunshine of
the Spotless Mind (about having our miserable inner bits removed)
and Being John Malkovich (another study in absurdity featuring
an actor playing himself) Cold Souls would be something less
than conceivable. The result ain't exactly a yukfest. Indeed, in its
arid pensiveness it flirts perilously close to taking itself too seriously,
a transgression perhaps even worse that going around soulless.
What makes Cold Souls good
and interesting is how it resonates with others questions many of us
are quietly asking ourselves. Currently, some 10% of all Americans are
taking antidepressant drugs. Many of these do so for good reason but
with a certain reluctance. Well inside the Tom Cruise lunatic fringe,
some have pondered the cost of what is, in some sense, the freedom to
pare away painful, inconvenient aspects of ourselves. How much of "you"
lies in your image of your ideal, happy self, and how much lies in your
own particular misery, with is as uniquely yours as your DNA? The answers
are not simple—we never ask if, say, our osteoporosis is part of
our "self", so why ask it of depression? But the wondering
is perhaps also a kind of saving grace, a sign that we're not just the
sum of our biochemical reactions.
The best aspect of Barthes' movie
has less to do with souls than about selves. In this, it is constantly
interesting .
©2009 Nicholas Nicastro
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