'Cold Souls': Metaphysical Comedy, Lightly Chilled

A literary souffle that's too watery to cohere, let alone rise, Cold Souls draws on such celebrated authors as Gogol, Chekhov and Charlie Kaufman.

Kaufman, of course, wrote Being John Malkovich, a film that suggested that it was possible to enter Malkovich's consciousness — and starred that actor himself.

Cold Souls strains a slightly different premise. The movie suggests that it's possible to empty Paul Giamatti's consciousness — and stars that actor himself.

Probably best known as Sideways' wine snob, or perhaps as founding father John Adams in the HBO miniseries, Giamatti here stretches very little to play a version of himself: a grumpy New York actor with more than his fair portion of existential nausea. He's rehearsing Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, and the role is giving him a pain — literally.

Rather than consult a doctor, Paul calls his agent, who recommends the latest thing. There's a company on Roosevelt Island (in New York's East River) that will extract your soul. Soul Storage, it seems, has even been profiled in The New Yorker.

Paul hurries to the firm, where one Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn) reassures him that life without a soul "makes so much more sense." After the procedure, the actor says he feels empty but "great." Yet he quickly becomes his crabby old self when he gets a glimpse of his soul — and discovers it resembles a chickpea. The setup of writer-director Sophie Barthes' debut feature is already sputtering, and the movie's logic only gets messier as the tale continues.

Back at the theater, Paul finds he now can't play Chekhov at all; every line comes out blithe, perky and otherwise un-Slavic. At home, the actor's wife (an underused Emily Watson) complains that his skin has become scaly.

Paul revisits Soul Storage, which turns out not to be primarily in the storage business; it also sells (or rents) the souls archived in its chilled vaults. Because he's doing Vanya, the actor selects the essence of a Russian poet.

When the leased psyche doesn't work out, Paul asks that his own soul be reinstalled. But it's not available, having been peddled to a Russian soap-opera actress who thinks she's acquired the inner force of a bigger Hollywood star.

At this point, the movie has run its course but is barely halfway done. So Barthes does what many directors have done before her: switches locations and brings in Russian gangsters.

Paul travels to St. Petersburg — always good for some scenic vistas — with the help of Nina (Dina Korzun), the "mule" who carries Russian souls to New York. (How? She sticks them in a part of her brain that was discovered by Descartes, or so the movie implies.) Together, Paul and Nina contrive to retrieve the actor's psyche.

The sort of movie in which a Russian mobster quotes pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, Cold Souls poses as a brainy, provocative venture. But it doesn't even have a working idea — comic or otherwise — of what the soul is. Ultimately, Paul is compelled to gaze into his own self, and what he sees there could not be cornier.

Nikolai Gogol had a cleverer idea. His Dead Souls is about a man with an elaborate scheme to use dead serfs as collateral in a real-estate deal. Gogol's comic novel was written more than 150 years ago, but it's still strikingly pertinent: Why struggle to find laughs in soul-swapping when it would be much timelier fun to mock credit default swaps?