Dir.
Marc Forster, US, 2006, 113 mins
Cast: Will Ferrell, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Maggie
Gyllenhaal, Queen Latifah
Review by Jean Lynch
Harold Crick (Ferrell)
is a tax inspector, a non-descript man who goes about his
daily life in a functional manner, accepting without prejudice
that most people will hate him because of his job. He’s
an everyman. He could be you. He could be me.
Except one day, something extraordinary
happens to Harold. He begins to hear a voice in his head.
No, it’s not
schizophrenia, as he resolutely tells his therapist, it’s
really a voice. A woman’s voice... narrating... everything
he does. It’s all very mundane – Harold cleans
his teeth..., Harold catches the bus... – so he does
his best to ignore it. However, all good stories must have
a twist, and this one is no exception. ‘Little did
he know’ says the plummy tones of the female narrator,
as Harold stands in a bus queue, ‘that this would result
in his death’. Why and when we don’t know but
Ferrell’s reaction (and those of the astounded people
around him who do their utmost to ignore the nutter) is delightful
here, the turning point in the film and story marking his
own, the moment when inaction is replaced by action, the
survival instinct kicks in, and Harold breaks open his shell
and the man inside begins to emerge.
He enlists the help of Literary Professor
Jules Hilbert (Hoffman) to help him understand the principles
of how novels work. Basically, there are two types of story – comedy
or tragedy. The first ends in a marriage, the second in a
death. Which of these paths is unfolding for Harold?
Well, strangely enough, there is this
girl. Her name is Ana (Gyllenhaal), she bakes cookies and
she’s quite
feisty, particularly when IRS agents come to investigate
her. Harold seems unlikely to be the hero of this particular
love story... or does he?
Meanwhile, across town, there’s a chain-smoking, caustic
novelist with writer’s block. She acts out the ways
she could kill off her main character but none of them seem
right, and now she has the added problem of Penny (Latifah),the
omnipresent representative from her publishers, breathing
down her neck. Karen (Thompson) wonders why it’s so
hard to plot the demise of one Harold Crick.
Can Harold win fair maiden before
Karen’s creative
juices begin to flow, thus thwarting his narrator’s
cruel intent?
Stranger than Fiction is a delightful
film for many reasons. First, it marks the moment when
Will Ferrell joined the ranks of Robin Williams, Jim Carrey
and, to a lesser extent, Adam Sandler, moving from visual,
OTT slapstick comedy to a much more mature performer. He
underplays almost to the point of stillness, and the occasional
outburst is not that of a clown seeking attention but is
born out of frustration at the situation. Here is a most
human character, one who elicits our sympathy, and we’re rooting for him as
he undergoes his arc. The vivacious Gyllenaal seems an unlikely
romantic partner yet both exude a naivete and charm that
seem to fuel a mutual recognition of need for the other,
and their courtship is painfully sweet. Thompson too is excellent
as Karen, and it certainly needs someone of Queen Latifah’s
stature to keep her in check. Well, there has to be some
reason for the former rapper’s presence as her wooden
performance adds very little else to the film, the only cast
member missing the mark and she does so with aplomb. Hoffman
is full of quirky misplaced enthusiasm as the academic more
excited about what’s happening than the consequences
for the person it’s happening to. Admittedly the role
doesn’t really stretch him as actor but hey, he’s
Dustin Hoffman – enough said.
The second thing that marks this film as a cut above is
the story, penned by Zach Helm, a fresh-faced young man (so
we saw at the recent London Film Festival) whose imdb profile
is remarkable only for his lack of previous form. With a
tale that has been likened to Kaufman, but with the emphasis
on the emotional rather than the intellectual, his achievement
with Stranger than Fiction is little short of astonishing.
But the icing on the cake for me is
that this film is an allegory for the question of fate
versus free will. Consider: Harold is aware of a force
outside of himself who seemingly knows his every move,
may be controlling it even, and who he believes can control
whether he lives or dies, and yet still believes he may
be able to outwit. Indeed, as he’s
told, why worry? You know you’re going to die – you
just don’t know when or how, but that’s the same
for everybody. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.
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