Cold Souls

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What is a soul? I happened to be reading a brilliant book about religion as a human manifestation. In the hunter-gatherer stage of our existence, it was believed that the souls of other people could inhabit our bodies. Cold Souls is not the most riveting Giamatti performance. He mesmerized us as John Adams in the HBO Series. Some people list Sideways as their favorite movie.

There are two moving portraits in this film – that of a woman poet with a soul too big for her own life and that of the woman at the center (or just off-center) of Cold Souls, the transporter of souls. In the beginning, she seems as cold as the picture this film gives us of a mechanized, industrialized Russia, but she wins our sympathy by the end; we cannot leave the theater without feeling deeply for her.

In this film, a soul is that without which we would not be ourselves. Losing one’s soul creates a feeling of emptiness, turns us into something neutral and barely alive; we’ve seen this theme in so many movies where the word soul is never mentioned. The Visitor comes to mind. This soul is our life-force, the thing that animates us to be ourselves. It’s an old thing, our hunter-gatherer soul.

Great acting, especially the portrayal of a historical figure – a living, or once-living, breathing human being – is the successful absorption of another person’s soul into the actor’s body. As John Adams, Giamatti does it.