Giamatti as Himself, Trying to be Believable
Steven Rea - Philadelphia Inquirer
Aug 19, 2009
PHILADELPHIA - In "Cold Souls," actor Paul Giamatti stars as - well - actor Paul Giamatti. He lives in Brooklyn. He makes movies. He's rehearsing a new production of "Uncle Vanya."
And he decides to have his soul extracted - a service offered by the Soul Storage Co. of Roosevelt Island, N.Y.C. - so he can get on with his life, free of the burden and worries that make his every waking day hard to bear.
Giamatti, who ran into the script - and the scriptwriter - at the Nantucket Film Festival three years ago, was flattered by the idea of playing himself. (Writer-director Sophie Barthes originally had Woody Allen in mind, but, hey, even by default, it's flattering.)
And Giamatti, best known for his performances in "Sideways" (worrywart oenophile), "American Splendor" (worrywart comic-book auteur), and the HBO historical miniseries "John Adams" (worrywart founding father), didn't think it would be any more difficult to slip into this character - nor any easier.
"The challenges were the same as playing any other kind of character," insists the actor, on the phone from Los Angeles.
"The challenges were just trying to be believable as whoever I was supposed to be," he says. "It sounds boring, but I didn't really get too wrapped up in thinking, 'Oh, it's myself!' I mean, I was aware of the fact that Sophie was interested to a certain extent in playing off a persona that I think I have from some of my other work. ...
"You know, this idea of somebody - of guys who know too much for their own good, and they can't deal with the amount of knowledge they have about themselves, or something. It just keeps them too anxious to function well in the world. That's the persona she was looking for, I think."
And is that a facet of the real Giamatti?
"Was it me at all, is that what you're asking?" Giamatti, 42, says with a chuckle.
"Again, I don't mean to sound evasive, but I can't really say to any greater or lesser degree than anything else I've played. I suppose there's always something of me in everything I've done. And something not of me in all the things I've done.
"I've always envied actors who are able to say, 'This character I just embraced because it was me, I know exactly what this guy is going through.'
"I don't think I've ever fully had that experience."
Remindful more than a bit of Charlie Kaufman's meta-endeavors "Being John Malkovich" and Eternal Sunshine of the "Spotless Mind," Barthes' "Cold Souls" co-stars Emily Watson as Giamatti's put-upon wife and David Strathairn as Dr. David Flintstein, a world-renowned neurologist who, as the Web site TheSoulStorageCompany.com will tell you, is also "one of the leading lights in the burgeoning field of paraneurology." (Check out the mock site, it's very cool.)
Early on in "Cold Souls," Giamatti is seen struggling through rehearsals for Chekhov's classic "Uncle Vanya." After the extraction of his soul, he returns to the theater, brimming with confidence, sure of his approach to the role. And he's terrible.
Giamatti says that that sequence - finding the "right levels of soullessness, or soulfulness, and having to pull off 'Uncle Vanya,' and then having to completely not pull it off" - was a challenge. As for the jaw-droppingly awful line readings, well, the actor has been there before.
"Oh, sure. I often feel like the line readings are unbelievably bad," he laughs. "I mean, I think I'm more familiar with feeling like I'm screwing the part up than I'm doing it right. That's definitely a familiar feeling. You're thinking, 'Boy, you're really onto something that's working great here!' and it's just terrible, terrible.
"I'm more than well-acquainted with that."
For Giamatti, "Cold Souls" was one of many projects that the actor worked on in a back-to-back-to-back flurry of activity.
There was "John Adams" (for which he won an Emmy). And "Duplicity," the jaunty Clive Owen-Julia Roberts corporate-espionage romantic comedy.
"And I did a movie called 'Pretty Bird,' a very weird little independent movie that I did ... and then I did a movie called 'The Last Station.' That's about Tolstoy - I don't play Tolstoy in it - but he had this very dramatic death in a train station, and this is about his last days, and Christopher Plummer plays Tolstoy. I play this guy named Vladimir Chertkov, who was a real guy, who was a sort of manipulative guy who became obsessed with Tolstoy and was his righthand religious man. The movie's about all these people pulling Tolstoy in different directions - his wife, his children, this crazy guy I play - and him trying to deal with all of it."
And what's next for Giamatti?
"Barney's Version," from the Mordechai Richler novel, with Dustin Hoffman as the dad of Giamatti's character.
"He's all right, he's still in the game," deadpans Giamatti about his co-star. "No, he's amazing."
Giamatti says that he and Hoffman have met several times and gone through a few rehearsals. The shoot starts next month in Montreal.
There was an initial moment of dread - a what-am-I-doing-working-with-Dustin-Hoffman? shudder of self-doubt - but Giamatti says the veteran movie star put him right at ease.
"He'll sit there and talk about how nervous he is and how he doesn't know what the hell he's doing," Giamatti says. "How this is his last job, he's never going to get hired again. And he's serious. ...
"You suddenly feel like you're just in a room with a really good actor. And you're just going to have fun."
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