Available on DVD: “Barney’s Version”

Paul Giamatti and Rosamund Pike in Barney's Version

Barney’s Version star Paul Giamatti probably would be the first to admit he isn’t your ordinary Hollywood leading man.

Neither tall nor lean nor strong of jaw, he is more of an anti-leading man — a guy with the face of a character actor and the body of a movie critic.

So it speaks volumes about his talent — even more than the Golden Globe he took home in January — that he was even cast to hold down the lead role in director Richard J. Lewis’ comedic drama. With leading ladies including the likes of Minnie Driver and a luminous Rosamund Pike, this is a George Clooney role, a Cary Grant role — a matinee idol role.

It turns out, it’s also a Giamatti role.

Not only does this anti-leading man knock it out of the park, but he knocks the cover off it. That won’t come as an enormous surprise for anyone familiar with Giamatti’s career. He’s proven his talent and versatility, from his lead part in the HBO miniseries John Adams to the role of an easy-to-anger radio-station manager in Howard Stern’s Private Parts, not to mention Sideways, a brilliant performance which was unjustly ignored by the Motion Picture Academy.

In Barney’s Version, not only does Giamatti solidify his reputation as a great actor — a brilliant cinematic chameleon capable of shifting effortlessly among comedy and romance and tragedy — but he helps transform Lewis’ film into a lovely bit of dramatic comedy.

Based on the novel by Mordecai Richler, it’s a movie that becomes more dramatic and more moving as it proceeds. Giamatti plays the guy in the title, an aging television producer who, at the film’s outset, plops himself at a bar only to be confronted by an ex-cop who has written a tell-all book about a particularly sordid chapter in Barney’s past.

That gets him reflecting on his life.

It’s been a full one but also one with considerable regrets. He’s the kind of guy who has a knack for screwing things up, particularly when it comes to love. He has been married three times — once for honor, once for money and once for love — and none has worked out quite the way he hoped.

A major reason is that he has a way of letting his sharp tongue take over when most people would yield to politeness and political correctness. (It’s a trait he picked up from his ex-cop pop, played by Dustin Hoffman, having loads of fun with the role.) That character flaw makes for some great shock-fueled laughs in Lewis’ film — Giamatti does full-on comic rage as well as anyone — but it makes for a disappointing love life for Barney.

The ladies, they don’t seem to be as amused by it as much as I am.

Beneath it all, though, he’s a sweet, soft-hearted guy. So when his heart aches, it’s hard not to feel for him, another testament to Giamatti’s talents. Given those emotional underpinnings and a timeline that covers 40 some-odd years, Barney’s Version boasts a faint but embraceable Benjamin Button quality, albeit absent the elegant fantasy elements.

But it isn’t all about love.

There are other factors at work, too. Early on, Lewis introduces a murder mystery, a thread that he plays out slowly, resolving it only as the film is concluding.

Also at work is a poignant surprise in the third act that serves to put an emotional bow on it all. It’s a lot of moving parts, and it gives Barney’s Version a slippery feel plot-wise.

But when you’ve got Giamatti in the lead role, you can get away with flaws.

Despite his Golden Globe, he wasn’t nominated for an Oscar this year — a major oversight on the part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. You shouldn’t make the same one.