Movie Review: Stranger Than Fiction

Stranger Than Fiction

Directed by Marc Forster

Columbia Pictures & Mandate Pictures

3 stars



Sorry, frat-boys. “Stranger Than Fiction” isn’t the sequel to “Anchorman” that you’ve all been waiting for. Though its trailer frames it as a typical Will Ferrell comedy, he spends an astonishingly small amount of his screen-time screaming wildly.

Directed by Marc Forster (“Finding Neverland”), “Stranger Than Fiction” centers on Harold Crick (Ferrell), an obsessive-compulsive workaholic who suddenly discovers that his life is being narrated by the voice of British novelist Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson).

Needless to say, it’s a rather upsetting situation, especially when Eiffel announces Crick’s “imminent” death. From there, the plot proceeds predictably as Harold strives to live his life to the fullest and, of course, bag the girl of his dreams (Maggie Gyllenhaal) along the way.

“Stranger Than Fiction” is screenwriter Zach Helm’s first movie, and it shows. Built on quirky narration, sitcom level wit, and self-conscious onscreen visuals, it’s a workmanlike indie-comedy for a mainstream audience.

With the success of low-scale Charlie Kaufman meta-films (“Adaptation” comes to mind throughout the movie), it was only a matter of time until someone tried to squeeze out a big-budget film like this.

The film’s architects try too hard to latch onto an art-house fad that they don’t really understand, with results that feel forced. Periodically, for example, Harold’s wristwatch briefly becomes a character before disappearing again from the plot. This device does nothing to enhance the movie’s tone, and since there are no other cases of spontaneous anthropomorphism, it ends up becoming a cheap plot prop.

Other points in the movie feature computer-generated modeling of Harold’s thoughts, but this technique, too, is used so rarely as to become superfluous. There’s so much cool but pointless visual trickery in this film that one begins to suspect Forster is attempting to distract you from the thin, weak narrative.

The trick backfires, however, as the film never quite coheres, due in large part to its unjustified cinematic bells and whistles. The truly endearing quirks are the more organic ones, like Dustin Hoffman’s constant barefootedness, or Thompson’s enchantingly disgusting way of putting out her cigarettes.

Despite all these flaws, the movie does succeed as a black comedy. Eiffel describes it at one point as a story about the “looming certainty of death,” and indeed much of the humor is aimed at our discomfort with the idea of dying.

Unfortunately, Ferrell is terrible as a romantic lead and, worse, uninteresting as a dramatic lead. There’s a lot of dead air when he’s not exhibiting his trademark belligerence. Ferrell is essentially expected to play a comedic straight man; most of the film’s humor derives from his mediocrity in the face of persistent absurdity. It’s a casting disaster: since when was Will Ferrell the everyman?

Dustin Hoffman recycles his character from “I Heart Huckabees,” which may or may not be a bad thing depending on how you feel about his recent tendency to ignore his natural talent.

Emma Thompson, however, completely saves the film at some of its worst moments. She throws herself into a stereotype—a dark author with writer’s block, who duses phrases like “fantastically depressing”—and plays her character as a modern, witty Virginia Woolf.

It’s fascinating, too, to watch her face off against Queen Latifah, who plays her assistant in some gratuitous yet excellent scenes. Most importantly, though, Thompson provides an emotional core and prevents the film from devolving into silly irrelevance.

Bottom Line: “Stranger Than Fiction” is not your typical Will Ferrell comedy, but it’s not really much of anything else, either. Watch it only if you’re an Emma Thompson fan, or if you’re in the mood for mediocre dark comedy.