Paul Giamatti stars as "Paul Giamatti" in the movie Cold Souls. Its a movie about an actor who is playing a part in a play that he gets uncomfortably emotionally involved with. Not being able to take the weight of the material he is performing, he decides to take advantage of a service he saw an ad for in the New Yorker. Soul Extraction. The idea is they extract your soul to lift the weight and stress off of you, and store it for a while, then when you've gotten through the troublesome part of your life, you can have your soul put back in. However, after Giamatti has his soul removed, he finds he's turned into quite the terrible actor. But a very funny actor at that. They offer him a rental soul, because upon his return to retrieve his soul, and fix his acting, he finds out they've misplaced his chickpea sized soul. Laughter does ensue quite frequently, but this movie is deceptively marketed as a big laughs comedy. It has some very funny parts, yes, but the heart (or soul if you will) of this movie is a drama, and a subversive story about life really. It becomes heartbreakingly fun to watch, and only an actor of Giamatti's caliber could really pull off such a challenging role. I found this movie to be very enjoyable for all the wrong reasons apparently. I was told it was a hilarious movie, and nothing more. But there is so much more lying under the surface of this movie. Watch it twice.
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