‘Cold Souls’ has its moments, but being Paul Giamatti isn’t as much fun as being John Malkovich

"Cold Souls" wonders if being Paul Giamatti is as much weird fun as being John Malkovich.

Not really, but this new meta-movie does have its moments, after establishing its offbeat premise.

The human soul, it posits, isn't an insubstantial spectral breeze that flickers like a candle when we leave this earth. It's another internal organ, like the appendix or the tonsil, just as potentially irritating and just as disposable.

Enter Giamatti, typecast as himself, a basset-eyed actor whose melancholy hangs on him like a worn and baggy pair of corduroy pants.

The Giamatti of "Cold Souls" has lately come to believe that his trademark soulfulness is a burden - it's getting in the way of his rehearsals of "Uncle Vanya" on Broadway - and decides that he'd be better off without it.

One day he spots an ad for a soul-removal and -storage operation, and hears testimonials from some of the newly soulless - I had mine removed, and I feel great!

In "Cold Souls," written and directed by Sophie Barthes, having your soul removed is a little like getting a prescription for Prozac. There is a tranquilizing effect, along with the nagging suspicion that it comes at the expense of some essential part of yourself.

Jokes ensue - the soulless Giamatti is an even worse actor than he was before. He misses not just the humor of Vanya, but everything else as well. So, he goes to recover his soul, encounters complications, ends up settling for the soul of a Russian poet and becomes the best Vanya ever.

The movie is very droll - David Strathairn is the straight-faced soul-storage entrepreneur, and there's a funny subplot about a Russian gangster trying to get Al Pacino's soul for his bimbo actress wife, and ending up with Giamatti's instead.

Barthes has fun sorting all of this out, but she's not so good at sorting out the soul itself. You may be surprised to learn that there is no spiritual component to Barthes' "soul" at all. It's more like an organ that governs talent, or creativity, or mood.

"Cold Souls" ends up being just another among the excessively large number of movies in which artists noodle about art.

If that's the soul, it may as well be the appendix.