Stranger Than Fiction

Talladega Nights may boast more box office receipts and a half-nude lap around the speedway, but it is Stranger Than Fiction, that other Will Ferrell film of 2006, that truly beguiles us with its charm. Resting upon a fantastical premise yet endowed with enough humor and pathos to ground it in reality it is one of those odd, quirky, slightly left-field slices of cinema that still manages to court a modest audience. It tells the story of Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), an I.R.S. employee whose solitary existence is suddenly interrupted by a woman’s voice who begins to narrate the events of his life as they unfold, and who mentions rather off-handedly the news of his impending death. After some reflection Harold decides that this voice, possessing a crisp, British accent, and a better vocabulary than his own, must belong to a writer, and so enlists the help of an English professor, Dr. Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), to act as a literary detective in his pursuit of the writer’s identity. With this proverbial cloud hanging over his head, Harold manages to fall for Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the owner of a bakery he is auditing, and soon his feelings about life become more complicated, and then so do ours about Harold. Meanwhile, the writer, Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), is unaware that the protagonist of her new novel is all too real and that her artistic decisions have actual consequences for a live human being. Her publisher has sent her an assistant, Penny Escher (Queen Latifah), to help oversee the book’s completion, but Kay’s inability to find a suitable death for Harold Crick, one with profound ironic and metaphoric properties, leaves her unable to finish it and plunges her into an artistic and psychological crisis, thus granting the real Harold his deepest wish: more time.

Given its literary preoccupations, this is at its heart a narrative-driven picture, and yet, there is something strangely arresting about its visuals. They compliment nicely the film’s sometimes whimsical, sometimes melancholy turns of plot. The genuine human longings reflected upon never feel exaggerated and are actually tempered somewhat by Marc Forster’s direction, which is lean and spare. Its’ spartan quality is amplified by many of the film’s locations. The careful employment of ultra-modern architecture, with its landscape of clean, polished surfaces, seems to mirror the barren inner life of its central protagonists: author and subject. It is largely in Ana’s bakery and home that we find external structure and interior décor imbued with real human warmth. There may be an air of predictability looming at certain times, but it never over-shadows the film’s surprisingly endearing cast of characters. True, there is a certain deliberate irony in the fact that the film saddles itself with the same dilemma as faces the novelist: the fate of Harold Crick. Everything unfolds so that some kind of resolution must take place, but deep down, it is not overly concerned with creating a heightened sense of anticipation for the inevitable climax, but in seeing ordinary moments of happiness and melancholy as small epiphanies.

Whether you detect in the film’s treatment of tragedy and comedy a faint whiff of sentimentality or honest, emotional catharsis, this much seems beyond dispute: it has an intellectual temerity and playfulness that are rare qualities of such accessible fare. Highly suggestive, it raises all sorts of interesting questions, leading the viewer to almost unconsciously create a range of dichotomies along the lines of art and life, tragedy and comedy, solitude and communion; the list could go on. It also wrestles good-naturedly with an issue of considerable heft, artistic excellence, and then quickly and wittily beckons us to see the inherent peculiarity of our own lives. In fact, its’ very title functions as a wake up call leading us towards that awareness. You may amble into the theater expecting a Will Ferrell comedy vehicle, but what you are treated to is an uncommon animal: aesthetics striving with the question of human life well-lived. Stranger Than Fiction is that desirable yet elusive figure in short supply at the multiplex these days: the pleasant surprise.