The Point of Life Is Living - Soul
Jazz is an improvisational art. Individuals will analyze and build upon what their bandmates are doing in realtime. If there are sour notes, you keep going and keep building—hoping that by the end, it all just fits. That must be what it is like to be in a Pixar creative meeting. Every idea is a good idea and your hypothetical question might turn into a riff for one of your colleagues. This type of environment can yield genius and disaster. In the case of Pixar, it usually translates to genius and Soul is no different. Its highs are beyond profound. But likewise, when notes fall flat, they stand out.
Joe Gardner (played by Jamie Foxx) is a middle school music teacher with big dreams of playing jazz on stage. On the day Joe finally gets his big break, he suffers an unfortunate accident that nearly kills him and sends his soul into an in-between state. For most of the movie, his soul wanders the space that exists outside our world in search of a way back.
While stuck outside his body, Joe’s soul does everything it can to avoid the “Great Beyond,” Pixar’s conception of what happens when we die. He winds up in the “Great Before,” Pixar’s conception of where souls exist before they are sent to Earth. There, he is tasked with mentoring 22 (played by Tina Fey), an old soul that has done everything it can to never be sent to Earth. 22 doesn’t see the point of living and it is Joe’s job to help it find its purpose and thus a place on Earth. Through a series of mishaps, both 22 and Joe must eventually figure out the point of life and come away with a different understanding of what it means to live.
In the pantheon of characters Pixar has ever created, 22 has to be near the very top. It is one of the purest distillations of a movie message you will ever see and yet manages to be endlessly complex. Tina Fey’s voice work is top-notch, but in that regard, she has a lot of company here. There is real (no pun intended) soul to this casting and everyone from Questlove to Angela Bassett shines.
When the trailer premiered and it looked like Pixar’s first Black story would be largely told in a theoretical realm, there was cause for concern. It turns out, however, that the final recipe preserves just enough of those cultural touchstones to feel like something new for the brand. The jazz, the stylings, the familial interactions—they all feel authentic and like a genuine step forward.
And while Pixar’s creative pistons were firing on all cylinders, the narrative gymnastics they pull off don’t necessarily amount to all they could have. There are sequences that feel like something a lesser studio would put together and fail to reach the high marks established by the film’s first Act. It was hard not to feel like a couple of additional rehearsals would have made this an even stronger set.
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