There is nothing subtle about this film: from the themes to the set dressing to the performances Stranger Than Fiction bludgeons viewers with the message that we should squeeze every ounce of life we can out of every minute.
Taking pages from Sartre, Luigi Pirandello, and Charlie Kaufman, Stranger Than Fiction centers on Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) who is quite possibly the most boring, placid human being ever to be brought into existence.
Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last six weeks you know that we know what Harold doesn’t: he is a character in a new novel by Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson). Eiffel’s problem, which is Harold’s saving grace, is a raging case of writer’s block. Karen is a writer of tragedies and she can’t figure out how to kill Harold Crick. Eiffel’s publishers hope that saddling her with Penny Escher (Queen Latifah), a “writer’s assistant,” will help her make her deadline, a deadline for a book on which she has ostensibly been working for over a decade.
In a turn that is less Adaptation than You’ve Got Mail, Harold, who is an IRS auditor, is assigned the case file of Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal doing her best Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally (right down to the voice)) a baker who as a protest against the government calculated what percent of her taxes would go to fund programs she doesn’t support and purposely withheld that amount from her payment instead sending a letter that begins “Dear imperialist swine.”
Where Harold is bland – beige walls, white sheets, and even a beige telephone that looks like it was lifted right out of a hotel room from late-1980s Italy – Ana is bohemian complete with a sleeve tattoo that starts at her shoulder and ends at her elbow, driftwood lamps, and a guitar that she took as payment from someone or another for a batch of muffins. Ensue unlikely romance between typewriter crossed lovers.
Added to this mix is Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman doing a star turn at “quirky”) in the role of God for both Harold and Karen. After his unsuccessful visit to a psychiatrist it is to this professor of literary theory Harold turns and thus begins his personal odyssey into actually living. Harold’s subsequent discovery that Eiffel is writing his life and his meeting with Eiffel are where this film breaks down as it comes after Eiffel has figured out how to perfectly, poetically kill off her main character. Eiffel’s crisis of conscience (how many real people has she killed, she wonders) begs the reality question (is Harold real or a character? Is Eiffel a god? Such existential thoughts presented in such broad strokes are a bit much even for the thinking viewer to contemplate in the midst of a subplot that is entirely standard Hollywood romantic comedy fare.)
What is most shocking, though, is not just Prof. Hilbert’s advice that Harold accept his death for the greater good of literature but that Harold takes such advice with barely a ripple in his psyche (perhaps this was meant to be a comment on the placid nature of humanity in the 21st century, or perhaps it’s just too-clever for its own good writing passing for art; I’m not really sure) and that Eiffel, in turn, consults Hilbert to determine what she should do now that she has met Harold in the flesh.
The character and nature of the film’s subplot should tell you everything you need to know about how this film ends, and that is the real problem. For a film that attempts to take on the true meaning of life, death, and work the ending and plot twists are too easy, too pat, and too Hollywood for comfort. The film ends up being merely cute when it could have been a serious meditation on life in that way that true human comedy is serious yet simultaneously ridiculous.
Cute it is, though, and basically entertaining. And it is because of these things and because when confronted by Penny, who has sufferred through rainstorms, tantrums, and cartons’ worth of cigarette smoke in her job, about just how she discovered the way in which she would kill Harold Crick Eiffel replies “like anything worth writing it came without warning, method, or reason” I’ll give Stranger Than Fiction three popcorns out of five.
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