Sundance 2009: "Cold Souls."
The shadow of Charlie Kaufman looms unignorably large over Sophie Barthes' first feature "Cold Souls," which stars Paul Giamatti as a well-known and very serious actor named Paul Giamatti, who's finding that his role in a upcoming stage production of "Uncle Vanya" is weighing on him. An article in the New Yorker steers him to a service being pitched to wealthy New Yorkers looking to lighten their metaphysical load by having their souls removed and stored, and soon Giamatti is in the care of Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn), who professes, not reassuringly, that his company has no idea how their process works. Extracted, Giamatti's soul takes the form of a chickpea. But while he no longer feels troubled -- in fact, he no longer feels much at all -- his soullessness isn't doing much for his acting. He falls down the rabbit hole of international soul trafficking, renting what he's...
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