Stranger than Fiction
You know, it's kind of hard to say what I went into this movie expecting to see. In one sense, there's a certain type of movie one expects when one goes to see a movie promoted as starring Will Ferrell. And on top of that, there was the notion that "Stranger than Fiction" was based on the Charlie Kaufmanesque conceit that a man suddenly began hearing a narrator as he went about his everyday life.
So there was the possibility that this could have been a goofy comedy or a mind-bending think piece. And, maybe because of that ambiguity, it turned out to be neither. Instead, it ended up being a collection of either mildly amusing or semi-poignant scenes that, in the end, amounted to not all that much.
Perhaps the one surprising thing about the movie is that Ferrell, of whom I've never particularly been a huge fan (that thought would have gotten me lynched in college, though) manages to bring some gravitas to his role as an IRS agent who falls for a Bohemian baker played by Maggie Gyllenhall. The scenes in which he tries to win over her favor -- first losing miserably, then making headway with several selfless gestures -- are genuinely pretty sweet.
In fact, I never thought I'd be saying this about a movie in any circumstance, but "Stranger than Fiction" seems like it would be a lot stronger if it had been played simply as a romantic comedy rather than trying to mindfuck the audience with its overplayed (and seemingly forced) high concept or its few attempts at silly Ferrell-style humor.
(SPOILERS AHEAD)
It's no particular fault of Emma Thompson (who plays the narrator) or Queen Latifah (the author's assistant), but every scene that features the author fails miserably. She has a hard time coming up with how to write the character's death. Okay. Nothing terribly earth-shattering there. If anything, the meeting between the author and her character would have been far more meaningful if we had only heard her narrator's voice up to that point.
Not to mention the fact that the book she's writing through the whole thing, which a literature professor (played admirably by Dustin Hoffman) calls her masterpiece, doesn't actually seem all that good. A man who leads a boring life learns to loosen up, then dies somewhat ironically (but not really ironically -- it's more just a crappy coincidence that has to do with a watch that gets a lot of focus in the story for no real reason). I'd feel a lot better about the big conceit if the story was actually some great work of literature and not something that comes off as horribly contrived.
Still, not all about the movie is bad. As I said, there's a palpable chemistry between Farrell, who really shows off some previously unseen leading-man chops and Gyllenhall, who is as adorable as ever. Hoffman probably gets the most laughs in the movie, not so much because of the script but just because the man himself is quite possibly made of perfect comic timing. And Thompson and Queen Latifah do their best with what they have, which isn't much. And there are some flashes of brilliance direction-wise. The visual aids showing Ferrell's character counting everything around him really put you into the character's head quickly.
Oh, and Buster Bluth's in it.
In the end, it all comes down to the script. The attempts in the film to be clever are simply overwrought, almost as if the screenwriter didn't have enough confidence in his characters to move the story along. Which is pretty sad in this instance, considering that this one of the only comedies of its type where the characters actually do manage to shine through, and the attempts to shoehorn it into a crazy high-concept plot just seem unneccesary. Maybe it could have been poignant without them. C-.
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