Director Marc Forster’s newest film, Stranger Than Fiction, tells the parallel tales of lonely IRS agent, Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), moving through his banal existence, and a writer’s block stricken author, Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), who is on the brink of finally finishing her masterpiece after a decade of developing it to perfection. What neither knows is that their lives are about to intersect. How? Well, one day Harold begins hearing a voice, a narrator to be precise.
At first the voice is harmless, although rather irksome for both Harold as well as the audience, continuously describing Harold’s every action in meticulous detail, with a sophisticated eloquence and a rich repertoire of words. Then one day it indicates that he’s going to die. This worries Harold and send him to the office of shrink, then a literature professor, played by Dustin Hoffman.
In the other story, Karen’s publisher has sent an assistant to make sure the final draft of her great opus is not delayed any further by reveries of suicide, daydreams of tragic car accidents, or the occasional trip to the emergency room to watch people suffer and search for those about to die.
Back in Harold’s world, he and his new companion are trying to decipher whether his life is meant to be comic or tragic. To aim for comic, the literary professor suggests Harold try to ignite a romance with a woman who can’t stand him. After an initial failed attempt, Harold’s told to try just living each day as if it were his last. He does so. And for the first time he begins to enjoy life. He even wins the heart of a quirky, young woman who used to hate him. Things are going well, until he hears Karen on the news. As his literary companion informs him, Karen only writes tragedies. To make things worse, after tracking Karen down and getting a copy of her unpublished manuscript, Harold realizes that the death she has in store for him is the most poetic death one could hope for. Should he accept his fate, or should he try to take control of his own life? That he the question he must face.
Now if this seems like an interesting premise to you, I cannot disagree. The script has a Charlie Kaufman type feel to it along with Charlie Kaufman-esque philosophical questions. The cast and the director are first rate. And the potential for dark humor is endless. But, there’s a problem. The film doesn’t take full advantage of its dark potential. For the first hour or so of the film, we primarily only see Ferrell doing a toned down Will Ferrell romantic comedy routine (think Bewitched) occasionally interrupted by a much funnier, much darker, much more interesting character storyline involving a perpetually depressed, death obsessed genius. After the first hour, I must say the film does improve, and once the worlds collide we get some truly great scenes in which we see an author meet one of her characters and several people weighing the meaningless life of one man against what may be the perfect tragic end that will not only give meaning to that man’s life, but also give the perfect ending to what just may be the greatest novel of our time. Will Ferrell even proves that he can be taken seriously as an actor in these scenes (not quite the Oscar nomination worthy performance I am convinced he will before the end of the decade, but another step in the write direction). The only problem now is that the film failed to consistently play from the darker side from the beginning.
Rating:***
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