Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is a thinly-sketched IRS agent who obsessively measures out his life in coffee spoons. One day he hears the stentorian, patrician voice of his own personal narrator, reclusive author Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), providing him an interiority with Douglas Adams-like serendipitous surreality. Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction even winks at the Adams connection with a sentient wristwatch and a moment where Crick's apartment gets demolished, Arthur Dent-like, by an uncommunicated work order. It also features sudden, unexpected love at the end of the universe with Crick's opposite, a free spirit baker named Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who falls under the eye of Crick's glum audit and, as literature professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) informs Crick, only hates him until she loves him if Crick's narrator is writing a romantic comedy. The struggle within the film is the same as the struggle without, then, as Crick tries to determine whether or not Eiffel's calm (and, as it happens, excellently-written) exposition will result in his poignant death or--good for him, bad for us--in his resurrection as a bland, non-descript leading man in another piece too frightened to allow itself the most appropriate ending. One way leads to a surprise masterpiece that soars on the chemistry (surprise again) between Ferrell and Gyllenhaal--the other leads to a film that's a lot better than I expected it to be, weighed down by a resolution that it itself comments on as equivocal, cowardly, and disappointing. To crib the analysis of Prof. Hilbert, Stranger Than Fiction is just "okay."

Stranger Than Fiction paints itself into an obscure corner by being a comedy that will disappoint highbrow and lowbrow audiences equally while its virtues might be lost on the middlebrow, however reluctant may be to dismiss it offhand. As she struggles to determine the method of Crick's demise, Eiffel tells the story of seeing a picture of a woman who's leapt to her death and commenting on the beatific expression on her face while around her is arrayed a halo of her blood and broken limbs. When the movie recreates that image towards the end, it raises all manner of questions about life and the end of it--and, more, about art (and eternity) versus the relative smallness of an individual's day-to-day. (In that respect, it raises the spectre of John Frankenheimer's The Train, of all things.) What sacrifice is worth erecting a monument to art and immortality? There's a rhetorical question posed at the end of the film that if Crick goes willingly to his death in order to honour a work of great art, isn't he the kind of guy we should want to keep around? And the difficult answer is that his life has no greater significance if he doesn't--that Christ Himself would have a different profile had God levitated Him off the cross in the nick of time with a series of half-hearted contrivances and hand-wringing justifications.

The question arises as to whether knowing that it doesn't have the muscle to be exceptional excuses Stranger Than Fiction from being disappointing and pandering--realizing at the same time that the only reason anyone would bother to ask the question is that the rest of Stranger Than Fiction has proven so oddly affecting. Hoffman, grooved into existential detective roles now with this and I [Heart] Huckabees, turns in an effortless a pastiche of tenured urban professorship, and Thompson, pale and jittery, is fine as a writer stricken with a decade-long bout of writer's block. Both pull off the trick of conveying subtlety and complexity at the same time, but it's Ferrell and Gyllenhaal who do the Carrey/Winslet tango--their scenes together are alchemical. Forster's penchant for magic realism finds full flower in the Fight Club-inspired graphics detailing the course of Crick's obsessive counting (again simultaneously broad, subtle, and complex), while Zach Helm's screenplay is literate up to and including its pale resolution. Just as Fight Club never turned a profit, however, the great irony of Stranger Than Fiction's equivocal ending is that it's not likely to be a box-office bonanza in its current form and that, lacking the courage of its convictions, it's also doubtful that the film will acquire a half-life as a flawed yet respected, oft-revisited cult classic in the mode of The Truman Show or, as it happens, Fight Club. It's a smart film indicated by a failure of nerve; a backhanded compliment to call it the first real disappointment of the season.-Walter Chaw

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the critic

Published: November 15, 2006