If you could unburden yourself of your woes and worry, the angst-y tune whistling in the back of your head, and just move through life with a clear mind and an easy gait, wouldn't you?
That's the question Paul Giamatti asks himself in Cold Souls, a clever existential comedy in which the Sideways star plays himself, and in which Giamatti, restlessly ensconced in his Brooklyn living room, reads an article about a company that promises to do just that: extract your soul from your body, and thereby remove the edge and dread from your being.
Cuisinart-ing Sartre, Descartes, Beckett, Faust, film noir, and cheesy sci-fi (the soul extraction machine looks like a pop-art take on a CAT scan), Cold Souls - from writer/director Sophie Barthes - has a discernible Charlie Kaufman influence, too. The real-life actor guy thing is straight out of the Kaufman-scripted Being John Malkovich, and the whole Soul Storage Co. setup, with its mild-mannered doctor at the helm (David Strathairn as David Flintstein, "world-renowned neurologist and one of the leading lights in the burgeoning field of paraneurology"), is not unlike Lacuna Inc., the memory erasure service provided by Tom Wilkinson in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
