By Matt Duncan
Coastal View News
There’s a saying that those who can’t do, teach. Joe
(Jaime Foxx)—the main character in Pixar’s latest animated feature, “Soul”—hopes
he’s the exception.
Joe is a middle-school band teacher. So, yes, he teaches.
But he sure can do it too—that is, he
sure can play the piano. And his dream is to make it big in the New York City
jazz scene.
But things haven’t exactly taken off for Joe. He’s a
middle aged guy with a pot belly, out-of-style clothes, and a dad mustache. His
students love him, sure. But, as Joe’s mom likes to remind him, his musical
career is a pipe dream.
Until, that is, one of Joe’s former students—whom Joe
inspired to be a professional musician—asks him to drop by his band’s practice
session to see if he can fill in at piano.
Joe is way nervous, but he nails the audition. The famous
leader of the band, Dorothea (Angela Bassett), is impressed, and that is all it
takes. Joe is in! So, naturally, Joe is on cloud nine.
Then he isn’t. Instead, he is on a more literal cloud heading
to the great beyond. For Joe died. (Or something like that. Maybe he’s not
quite dead? Just about to die? The metaphysics are a little unclear.) In his distracted,
post-tryout euphoria, Joe fell into a manhole and his little, phosphorescent blue
soul wakes up in a different place.
Joe resists. He’s not ready to die. Not only does he
really, really want to play with Dorothea’s band, he has this idea that, if he
doesn’t, his life will have been pointless, meaningless.
So Joe exploits a glitch in the heavenly machinery to
move from the “Great Beyond” to the “Great Before”—the place where unborn souls
are readied for life on Earth. Joe gets roped into being a “soul counselor” for
unborn souls in need of guidance.
Unfortunately he gets assigned 22 (Tina Fey). 22 is
pretty much a hopeless case. Everyone from Gandhi to Abraham Lincoln to Mother
Teresa has tried to mentor 22, but to no avail. 22 is stubborn—she doesn’t want
to be born.
But Joe is desperate to get back to Earth, and he figures
he can hitch a ride with 22 if he gets her born. So he tries. The main ingredient
missing for 22 is her lack of a “spark”. Joe tries to help her find it—in music,
art, science, food, sports, and whatever. Nothing works.
So Joe tries a different tack—he gets hooked up with some
hippie mystics who help lost souls, and they agree to help him get back to
Earth.
And he succeeds! The problem is, he accidentally brings
22 along too. The even bigger problem
is, 22 is in Joe’s body and Joe is in the body of a therapy cat.
Joe frantically searches for more hippie magic while
simultaneously trying to preserve the career opportunities he had worked so
hard for.
Meanwhile, 22 is gobsmacked by life (again, in Joe’s
body), and Joe is learning to experience the world from a different perspective
(again, in a cat’s body). 22 eats pizza, inspects interesting flora and fauna,
feels, hears, touches, and smells. She’s no longer thinking about purposes and
sparks and the like. At the same time, Joe is trying so hard to get his old
life back, but he begins to wonder about what he, or anybody, should, in the
end, at the core, strive for. Fame? Success? Accomplishments? Or something
else?
“Soul” is pretty abstract. With all the talk of souls,
purpose, and sparks, it definitely runs the risk of going over younger kids’
heads. It also runs the risk of feeling less approachable, warm, and (dare I
say it) soulful than more concrete, Earthly stories.
For comparison, Pixar’s “Inside Out”—about tiny little
mental states—also ran this risk. But “Inside Out” totally nailed it because
there was enough concrete scaffolding in the background, the characters were
really amusing, and the abstract bits tied in really nicely with the real-life
bits and provided some really powerful insights.
“Soul” has some, but not all, of that. The otherworldly
scenes are a bit dry, long, and (again, dare I say it) lifeless. And the connection
between the two realms felt more made up and less real—versus the mental realm
in “Inside Out” which, in essence, felt pretty true to life. Also, the very end
of “Soul” is regrettably cheesy.
Nonetheless, “Soul” has some very high points too. What
Joe and 22 realize about what a “spark” is (hint: it ain’t just an interest in
music, science, or sports) is nothing short of profound. And how this might
reshape their—and our—conception of what makes a life worth living is
thought-provoking and, I think, compelling.
So, just as Joe might in the end recommend to us that we live for the here and now, rather than something dreamier or loftier, in a similar way, I recommend that you watch “Soul”, not for the comparatively banal stuff set in the clouds, but for the concrete, true-to-life, moving, powerful, very well done scenes and insights from Joe’s life.
