Stranger Than Fiction
Mark Forster's Stranger Than Fiction is an oddly delightful movie. What I mean by that is that I'm not going to recommend the movie to anybody who doesn't already intend to see it. Zack Helm's screenplay leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and any attempt at a synopsis is bound to make it seem inane. Stranger Than Fiction has to be seen to be felt. Its parts are much greater than its sum; for some viewers, this will make for disappointment. For anyone who can go along for the ride, willing to take whatever Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, and, especially, Emma Thompson are giving out - that would be me - Stranger Than Fiction is going to be "oddly delightful."
The spirit of play is realized from the start in a stream of digital screens and figures that unfold and pivot with the live action. One, for example, enumerates the toothbrush strokes that Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is obsessively counting. As we follow Harold through his ordinary day as an IRS auditor, these mercurial screens, totting up the number of steps Harold takes to cross the street and the average number of files that he gets through in a day, mock the regimentation of a life that could equally well seem soul-crushed. Harold's soul, however, is not crushed. It's just sleeping, and the movie is going to wake it up with a belt of Hollywood Existentialism: the meaning of life explored in preposterous situations.
The fun is advanced a step further when we see that Harold can hear the voice-over that Emma Thompson has been delivering since the start, in a film so far largely without dialogue. I am almost certain that this joke is not entirely new, but it is taken very far here, and worked so deftly that we're willing to sidestep certain operational questions. If author Kay Eiffel (Ms Thompson) is, in effect, capturing the lives of living people and then, through the power of her fictions, sending them to untimely death in novels, then why is Harold the first to overhear her? At what point in her writing creative process does transcription become command? Geeks in the audience will zero in on her Selectric typewriter, because nothing is official, nothing "happens" until it has been typed onto the page by that machine. We could get very lost here in speculation, and forget that it's only a movie. In any case, when the voice-over starts talking about Harold's imminent demise, his irritation explodes into frantic self-preservation.
I did find myself wondering how on earth Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), a professor of literature, was going to help Harold track down the author of his impending doom. Hilbert tackles Harold's predicament as an engaging literary puzzle, blithely unconcerned by its life-and-death consequences. In the end, all of his detached fussing turns out to be unnecessary, because a clip of Kay Eiffel appears on the television in his office when Harold is there; he immediately identifies her voice, and tracking her down becomes a matter of unauthorized IRS file-searching. Presently Harold is in possession of the sketched-out manuscript.
The only unsatisfying aspect of Stranger Than Fiction - and this is going to sound more important than it is - is its love story, which neither Mr Ferrell nor Maggie Gyllenhaal can rescue from a somewhat stale predictability. Ms Gyllenhaall plays Ana Pascal, a bohemian baker who has deliberately withhold a portion of her taxes in protest. Ana is simply too sane and constructive to believe that such a ploy would accomplish anything, thereby exposing it as a plot device to bring Harold into her bakery for an audit. Kay Eiffel appears to have taken control of the story at this point, because Harold somewhat uncharacteristically - or not? - falls in love with Ana, in the teeth of her abusive contempt. (So much for screwball options.) It is all very unlikely, and not in the way that the voice-overs are unlikely. It was difficult to believe that the gorgeous Ana would be free to fall in love, much less that she would fall in love with the unprepossessing Harold. (The director misses no chance to show off the less-than-ideal arrangement of Mr Ferrell's features.) The actors throw themselves into romance with a gusto that, sadly, attests more to their professionalism than to anything else.
Actually, there was one thing about Stranger Than Fiction that's less satisfying than the love story, and that is Queen Latifah's evident boredom. I've only recently discovered Queen Latifah, and I think that she's a warm and lovely actor. But she's given nothing to work with here beyond a few straight lines. She plays Penny Escher, an "assistant" sent out by Eiffel's publisher to help her finish her blocked book (the one about Harold). She ends up being no more instrumental in solving Eiffel's problem than Hilbert is in solving Harold's, but Mr Hoffman has a lot to play with, and that keeps him lively. Poor Queen Latifah has nothing to do but look serious in a vaguely pained way. It's a waste.
These are afterthoughts. While the film was rolling, I was entertained and, from time to time, elated. Miss Thompson is fantastic as a writer whose block is crazing her. She's a beehive of irritable but not irritating tics, and she inhabits her very odd writing space with stunning authority. In two brilliantly contrasted scenes, Linda Hunt and Tom Hulce play very different mental health workers. Tony Hale is wonderfully nerdy as Dave, Harold's IRS colleague and eventual roommate. Will Ferrell plays his role straight, for the most part, and one of the best things about his performance is Harold's initial expression of mild outrage when he hears Kay Eiffel's voice. It's an Everyman look that signals a major violation of the Mind Your Own Business rule. Only later does this give way to frantic bewilderment.
