Sundance 2009: Paul Giamatti, Michael Cera, and Living in Public

Here's what I learned about the stars at Sundance this year: Paul Giamatti literally gave up his soul for a little peace and to improve his performance as Chekov's Uncle Vanya. Michael Cera and Charlyne Yi gave up their privacy when they agreed to let a documentary crew follow them around on dates. And both of these things can lead to madness.

Or at least that's the premise of two fictional films and a documentary playing at Sundance. Cold Souls and Paper Heart both incorporate the images and names of their stars into their fictional stories, and a third film, Ondi Timoner's documentary We Live in Public tells the cautionary, non-fiction tale of Internet entrepreneur Josh Harris who sought to broadcast his life on the web and paid a dear price for it, a story that's especially relevant in the age of MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter.

* * *

Paul Giamatti plays Paul Giamatti in Cold Souls, written and directed by Sophie Barthes. Rehearsing for the lead role of Uncle Vanya on the stage is taking a lot out of him, and the weight of his soul is increasingly heavy. Thankfully, a new service in New York can lift the latter burden by extracting and storing a person's soul indefinitely. The company is even listed in the Yellow Pages.

Cold Souls is clever and witty, and it makes excellent use of Giamatti's exasperated persona ("My soul is a chickpea?" he says upon seeing his extracted essence in a jar). But it's eventually a more serious and distant film than something like Being John Malkovich, more difficult to enjoy but also a somewhat more thought provoking experience. The real Giamatti is brilliant when the fictional, soulless Giamatti tries to play Vanya as a blend of William Shatner and Benny Hill (or at least that's how it sounded to me), and he turns intense when he rents the soul of a Russian poet and gives it another go. The soul storage-and-rental service allows Barthes to build several interesting metaphors: artists may struggle under the burden of their personal lives, but good art requires it; frivolous Americans exploit regions of the world who sell their souls to survive; and "mules" who import souls on the black market run the risk of accumulating too many soul fragments. Come to think of it, maybe actors do too. But there are so many ideas in the film that each one gets only a few shallow iterations. Giamatti gives one of his best performances, but even with the film's humor this chilly head-scratcher is hard to recommend as either solid entertainment or deep insight.

* * *

Paper Heart begins with actress Charlyne Yi (the goofy Jodi in Knocked Up) who sets out to make a documentary about love. She doesn't believe in it, so she wants to interview people to get their thoughts on the L-word. With a documentary crew in tow, she talks to regular folks across the country about when and how they fell in love, and soon she runs into actor Michael Cera at a party. He likes her, and when they end up dating, their relationship becomes the centerpiece of her documentary, at the insistence of the film's director. But she's still not sure she believes in love.

Aside from the brief interviews with real people, the entire film is fictional, but the scenes between Yi and Cera are so charming and casual that I kept running into people at Sundance who weren't quite sure what was real and what was fake. Unfortunately, the fake production problems of the film-within-the-film take over the story, and the question of whether Yi believes in love stretches way beyond the point of interest. It's a half-hour premise in a feature length film that — like Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist — brightens whenever Cera and his co-star are alone on screen but feels tedious when they're not.

* * *

Giamatti, Cera, and Yi are pretending to be themselves on camera, but Josh Harris actually did it. In a series of Internet ventures that became increasingly experimental, Harris plumbed the depths of living without privacy, and his exploits are profiled in the new documentary We Live in Public. Harris made money founding Jupiter Communications during the dot-com boom of the 1990s, but then he lost it all on two expensive experiments. The first was a month-long stunt in New York in which volunteers lived in a bunker that was festooned with cameras in every corner, and the bunker's residents were required to submit themselves to daily Gestapo-like interrogations. What began as a freedom-celebrating cadre of adventurers, something like an indoor Burning Man, devolved before the month was finished into a complicated web of head games that ended with a raid by police who thought they'd discovered a millennium cult.

A few years later, Harris and his then girlfriend moved in together, covered their apartment with cameras, and started weliveinpublic.com, broadcasting themselves live on the Internet, 24 hours a day. Chat rooms alongside their streaming videos became a perpetual peanut gallery that critiqued their every move and took sides with every argument. The film doesn't mention this, but Harris was one of several people to do this in the 1990s. My sense is that most of his ventures have been more opportunistic than visionary, but that doesn't make him any less fascinating, and Ondi Timoner's fast-paced, occasionally critical documentary is at the very least a spot-on portrait of those crazy boom years when people with strange ideas were flush with cash.

See more Sundance coverage here.