In the wonderfully odd "Cold Souls," Paul Giamatti plays Paul Giamatti, a noted actor who's floundering in rehearsals for an upcoming production of "Uncle Vanya," the Chekhov play. Paul feels weighed down, heavy, obscurely unhappy — rather like the play's title character. It's really getting to him. One night, paging through The New Yorker, he comes upon a story about a new fashion, and the company that caters to it: Soul Storage. He finds their ad in the phone book, and it speaks to him: "Is your soul weighing you down?" He notes the address.

The company's offices are sleek, bland, appropriately soulless. The director, a slick Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn), comes right to the point: After Paul's soul is "disembodied," he can store it in a cryogenic locker there on the premises or, if he prefers — "for tax purposes" — in New Jersey. "When you've got rid of the soul," Flinstein says, "everything makes so much more sense."

Could there be any actor more ideally equipped to play a man with a burdensome soul than Paul Giamatti? He's an actor who's all droop and muttering defeat, and first-time feature director Sophie Bathes uses him to illuminate her strange story like a spluttering candle. Paul (or "Paul" — the Malkovichian name gimmick serves no plot purpose, really) takes the plunge and has his soul extracted, in a machine that looks like a cross between an MRI and a Christmas tree. Afterward, he feels "hollow, light ... bored." And stoked with a new, steely aggression: Raving through his next "Vanya" rehearsal, he reaches out and grabs his female co-star's butt — a bold new approach to Chekhov. His wife (Emily Watson) notices this unpleasant change; everybody does.

Paul returns to Dr. Flintstein in search of a refund. "If you get your soul back," the doctor warns, "you will feel the unbearable weight again." So Paul opts for a rental. Perusing the company's list of available souls, he chooses one harvested from a Russian poet. Perfect. Well, not actually.

As Paul's struggle continues, we learn the workings of the international traffic in disembodied souls, which is headquartered in St. Petersburg, and involves the smuggling of Russian souls embedded in mules — people whose occupation puts them at considerable spiritual risk. One of these operatives, a glum woman named Nina (Dina Korzun), becomes involved in a new commercial strategy devised by her boss: the reverse trafficking of American souls for needy Russians. Chief among these is the boss' imperious wife, Sveta (Katheryn Winnick), a soap opera star who longs for a celebrity implant — the soul of George Clooney would be nice; or maybe Kevin Spacey. Nina, just back from New York, brings her the soul of Al Pacino — or so she says. Actually, it's the stolen soul of Paul Giamatti, not that the talent-challenged Sveta will notice the difference.

Can Paul somehow get his soul back? The movie's plot complications spread like a rash, and Giamatti — our Giamatti, the one we know from "Duplicity" and "American Splendor" — traverses each new ridiculous wrinkle with a finely modulated deadpan. (Informed that his missing property has been installed in the body of a bubble-headed TV star, he's appalled: "She could ruin my soul!") The movie ends in a (literal) blur that feels arbitrary and unshaped. Until then, though, it's a great bumpy ride. Director Barthes, who also wrote the script, has an engagingly bent sensibility — and as we see in a subplot involving a dark dream set in an orphanage, a lot of soul, too.

Don't miss Kurt Loder's reviews of "Julie & Julia" and "Paper Heart," also new in theaters this week.

Check out everything we've got on "Cold Souls."

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