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Cold Souls (2009)
Rib-tickling brain-food
Cold Souls - Sydney Film Festival, June 2009
The first drawcard of this film for me was character actor Paul Giamatti playing himself. His neurotic self-caricature testifies to the ego-free professionalism of a true thespian. Let's call his scripted self 'Screen-Giamatti' OR (S-G for short) to avoid confusion.
The other draw was the high-concept premise: commercialized soul-transfers as a shortcut over emotional hurdles. I was hoping for a return to the territory of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: light-fingered deployment of a fantastical idea for ambitious dramatic and intellectual game-playing. I was not disappointed. The film's running gag exploiting the absurdity of capital-S Souls being reduced to concrete commodities is comparable to Charlie Kauffman's deadpan weirdness for rib-tickling value. There are however some telling divergences in approach.
Where Sunshine's Michel Gondry deployed inventive visual metaphors to show inner-self goings-on, writer-director Sophie Barthes's film remains agnostic about the profundities involved, portraying the soul-transfers' effects rather. For example Screen-Giamatti's scientifically-induced 'soullessness' surfaces in his vulgarized choices in tasteless clothes and insensitive conversation.
Have you heard of the misdirecting convention of storytelling named the McGuffin by Hitchcock? It means a supposedly fabled mystery or treasure is used drives the characters into action,but it is often swept under the carpet once whatever drama the screenwriter really wants to present has upstaged it. The perennially disappointing McGuffin actually gets a pay-off of sorts in Cold Souls.
In Pulp Fiction the bloodily-defended briefcase was coyly hinted by the glowing aura of its unseen contents to hold a disembodied soul. In Cold Souls the quest is quite prosaically driven by Screen-Giamatti's quest to retrieve his sold-on soul from a Russian starlet (who thinks she acquired Al Pacino's). This plot offered abundant possibilities for speculating on what a soul would carry with it to its new home, but these sort of questions were left disappointingly unexplored.
What did get taken to its conclusion was S-G's conflicted avoidance of the ample opportunities provided to him to gaze into his own internal landscape, fearing what horrors or banalities he may find. His final shaky surrender to his own fathomless inner life was quite poignant, an unsentimental and ineffable portrayal of self-acceptance.
This film's indirect presentation of the en-souled and the soul-less, kept me wondering what the creators were trying to say about such differences. These are foregrounded whenever Screen-Giamatti's stage rehearsals of Chekhov are on display.
Why does the self-pitying passivity of Uncle Vanya make for soulful art, while a bit of gratifying slap-and-tickle does not? What is really being lost, from individuals and their culture, under Russian gangster-capitalist's soul-stealing exploitation of their workforce? Is Giamatti's turn as a de-souled fashion-disaster a take on the Ugly American stereotype? Are a sense of humour and a reflective self-awareness really mutually exclusive? I look forward to a wider release of this film and the chance to discuss such questions with other interested posters.
Accidents Happen (2009)
Showcase of solid characterization, screen writing and performances
Accidents Happen – Sydney Film Festival, June 2009 I was sold on this film by a description of Geena Davis who "shines as the screwball mother". The SFF program seemed to promise a screwball family comedy, with Davis' fearlessness in performance carrying the required bravado. So I was surprised when the opening sequence, a slow-motion shot of a playing child interrupted by an elderly neighbour accidentally barbecuing himself, suggested another tone was in the offing: a coming-of-age black comedy. That combination works well here.
To labour the labeling a little, ladling on a portmanteau, ACCIDENTS HAPPEN is a 'dramedy'. It's a realistic story of an early 80s suburban family unit fractured by an auto accident. The emotional weight of their tragedy squeezes absurdity out of the cracks in their stasis. Gloria Conway (Davis) turns her rapid-fire wit to lashing her 'useless' ex-husband but that is clearly a losing game for her as she is not much more on top of her grief for their lost children than he is.
The relationship between surviving but bereft younger son Billy and his ballsy mother is the meat of the film. They present a remarkably compelling take on an interdependent relationship. They made me really care that they would work it out, and a refreshing change from the common film stereotype of merely alienated teens.
The film overall is a showcase of great characterization through screen writing and performances, not just from the poised teen-aged leads but also minor characters like the barbecue-induced widow Mrs Smolensky. She steps startlingly out of being a background character in the payoff scene at the film's end.
That final sequence also left me backpedaling on conclusions I leapt to earlier about the film's symbolism. Up until that point, the crucial role of a bowling ball in the plot lent itself to symbolism of emotional baggage, a crushing burden to carry and destructively out of control when neglected. That ball's ultimate destination revealed over the end-credits indicates the authors either didn't have that in mind, or were pointing us to some other significance entirely. Comments here suggesting what that significance might be are very welcome.
Originally posted at http://moviebookchats.posterous.com/movie-review-accidents-happen