Released November 19, 2009
The idea behind Sophie Barthes' feature debut as writer/director is inspired. What if, she asks, the human soul doesn't merely exist, but can be extracted? What would a human be without a soul?
Paul Giamatti, playing a version of himself, is an actor struggling through rehearsals of Chekov's Uncle Vanya. Anxiety ridden, he meets with Dr. Flintstein (a suave David Strathairn) in an office that's a cross between a dentists and a hair salon. Flintstein offers him a solution: have his soul extracted and free himself from the burden of his emotions. Do so, he says, and "everything becomes functional”.
The procedure is a cop out, of course, the newly soulless Giamatti now able to perform, but without conviction. After his soul is stolen by a Russian-American soul trafficking business, in desperation he chooses the soul of a Russian poet as a temporary solution. While Paul seems little different whether or not he has his soul, his perceptive wife (Emily Watson) knows something is amiss.
Bleak yet darkly comic, this philosophical tragicomedy is reminiscent of the work of Charlie Kaufman, minus the overt surrealism. Barthes' wrote the script for Giamatti, and it shows. His furrowed brow and hilarious deadpan mesh perfectly with the absurdity of the premise, which is played straight as if soul storage were an everyday practice.
The script was a screenplay competition winner, and is inventive but conventionally structured. By the time Giamatti visits an austere snow-covered St. Petersburg, as if that was necessary to visualize the characters' mood, the unwavering weight their grievances almost becomes too much. It does however reflect the film’s point of view: without a soul we would be unburdened, but empty; you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
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