Moviegoer Diary: Cold Souls, The Good, The Bad, The Weird

COLD SOULS

Plot In A Nutshell
Writer/director Sophie Barthes’ offbeat comedy/drama about a heavy-spirited actor (Paul Giamatti, playing himself) who decides to have his soul extracted — only to discover, when he realizes he wants it back, that it has fallen into the hands of Russian black marketers.

Thoughts
I’ve come to this movie so late that I don’t know if I have much to say about it that hasn’t already been said by every other reviewer before me — yes, it’s highly derivative of Charlie Kaufman (mainly Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, only with a soul-extraction business instead of a memory-erasing business, combined with the respected-serious-actor-playing-himself gimmick of Being John Malkovich), and no, it doesn’t really come together even on its own imitation-Kaufman terms — but I think I liked it slightly more than the majority of critics all the same.

Or at least, I was mostly with it during the first 45 minutes, especially in the scenes where Paul Giamatti is playing the “soulless,” post-extraction version of himself. He’s decided to undergo the procedure because he’s in rehearsals for a stage production of Uncle Vanya and he’s having trouble wrapping his mind around the character, and Giamatti’s de-souled version of Vanya is pretty hilarious. I also liked the way Sophie Barthes never quite defines exactly what function the soul performs — Giamatti emerges from the soul-extraction machine (it looks like a huge MRI) with all of his memories intact, but at the same time feeling slightly bored and hollow. His soul, which is stored for safekeeping in a clear glass cylinder, is the size and shape of a chickpea, and Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn), the soul-removing expert who’s handling Giamatti’s case, looks at it, he remarks how strange it is that something that small can do so much to weigh down a person’s spirits.

Strathairn, all brisk unflappability, is the best thing in the movie — smartly, Barthes leaves it ambiguous as to whether the character has had his soul removed as well — and I wish the film had spent more time on him and his undefined relationship with his pretty young assistant, Lauren Ambrose. (Or maybe I’m just thinking of how surprising, funny, and unexpectedly poignant the relationship between Tom Wilkinson and Kirsten Dunst was in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.) But instead, Cold Souls gets bogged down in all the business about the Russian soul smugglers and the efforts of Giamatti, who is now carrying around the soul of a Russian poet, to track down his original soul. (Amusingly, the head of the smuggling operation has implanted it in his girlfriend, a struggling soap actress who believes it belonged to Al Pacino.)

This plot thread, which takes up most of the second half of the film, has Kaufman’s moody, melancholy spirit, but lacks the compelling emotional stakes that characterize his best films. Barthes never comes up with a good reason for why Giamatti would want to divest himself of his soul, and she never clearly explains what the stakes are if he doesn’t get it back. (The character of Giamatti’s wife, who’s played by Emily Watson, almost feels like an afterthought.) Cold Souls has moments of humour, but it doesn’t quite commit to being a comedy, but it’s too dry and odd to be a drama either. It’s just a curiosity, a chickpea in a glass cylinder. It makes kind of a neat sound if you rattle it around, but how long does that stay interesting?

RATING: 2.5/5

* * * * *

THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD

Plot In A Nutshell
Director/co-writer Kim Ji-woon’s rollicking, Sergio Leone-inspired 2008 Korean action epic about a clownish bandit, a coolly incorruptible bounty hunter, and a sadistic mercenary in 1930s Manchuria, all hot on the trail of a map that supposedly points the way to buried treasure.

Thoughts
“If you chase something to get something, something else will come chasing you,” a character says during a rare contemplative moment in The Good, The Bad, The Weird. “Life is about chasing and being chased.”

So is this movie, which contains not a single moment in which the characters aren’t pursuing someone, being pursued themselves, or (more often than not) both at the same time. And it’s not just the three main characters I mentioned in the plot summary who are racing around the dusty outer regions of Manchuria either — a band of outlaws and the Japanese army are hot on the trail of that map too, and on more than one occasion, all five forces converge at once in action sequences that manage to be exhilarating, exciting, and funny despite their complexity in that way that so many Asian directors seem to have mastered and so few American directors have learned from.

Kim Ji-woon comes up with so many playful, imaginative tricks with his framing — like the throwaway shot in the film’s first big setpiece where you see just enough of an unnamed bandit getting a spear through his chest to tell what’s happened — that you want to practically collapse with gratitude that he took the time to get even that little moment just right. There’s also a marvelous, seemingly effortless bit where the bandit Yoon Tae-goo (Song Kang-ho, from The Host and Thirst) has a meeting with the owner of an opium den, and Ji-woon lets us take in the room with two complete 360-degree rotations of his camera, always making sure something important is happening within the frame... or at least that one of the guy’s sexy female employees is moving across it.

Ji-woon is, of course, paying homage to Sergio Leone, and while he replicates several classic scenarios from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, and For a Few Dollars More (right up until the climactic, ritualistic three-way duel to the death for a prize that might actually be worthless), but more importantly, he replicates the spirit of Leone. Leone loved to set his films on the cusp of history, when the mythic period of the Old West was giving way to the modern age of trains, telegraphs, and the encroachments of civilization; Ji-woon, quite brilliantly, realizes that 1930s Manchuria represents a similar turning point in Asian history, when bandits on horseback could share the screen with motorcycles and locomotives and machine guns. As in Leone, all of Ji-woon’s characters are motivated either by money or a long-held thirst for revenge. And like Leone, Ji-woon employs a sweeping, attention-getting (albeit anachronistic) score that italicizes the action and encourages the audience to savour the verve of its staging, the giddily enjoyable movieness of it all.

If a movie as fun as The Good, The Bad, The Weird had been made in North America, people wouldn’t be able to stop talking about it. There’s an unjustly forgotten genre, even more so than Westerns and musical — the yarn. People love yarns so much — so why has Hollywood pretty much stopped making them?

RATING: 4.5/5