Stranger Than Fiction

With Thanksgiving arriving quickly, and Christmas products already lining the shelves of stores, you will begin to hear people say that it is “the most wonderful time of the year.” Whether or not this time is really the year’s “most wonderful,” remains to be seen, but there is something about the approaching season that fills me with joy. This uplifting element is, of course, the movies.
As I have previously observed, the months of November and December are possibly the two most promising when it comes to the cinema. As the year draws to a close, studios unveil their strongest films in hopes that they will be fresh in the minds of the Academy voters when Oscar decisions are made.
Some films are meant to showcase the talent of directors, some to delight the audience with clever dialogue or an insightful plot, and others are vehicles for stars to display their talent in hopes of an Oscar nod or, dare they dream it, a win.
“Stranger Than Fiction,” the latest pleasurable harbinger of the season of award bound films, is a film that has so much going for it that it almost seems bound to disappoint. The plot, as can be suspected from the trailers, is not a conventional one, but something more along the lines of Charlie Kaufman, and certainly not like the traditional Will Ferrell outing.
This brings me to the second strength of the film, the cast. Ferrell abandons the frat boy Saturday Night Live persona we know so well from films like “Old School,” “Anchorman,” and “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.” Not that his past performances are unworthy of praise, they simply all run together. He seemed to only be able to fill the role of a loud-mouthed jerk who is not quite living in the real world.
Ferrell’s Harold Crick is not loud, not a jerk by any means, and he is not only living in the real world, he is stuck in the real world. His life is all about numbers and order. All this orderly perfection comes crashing down when Harold begins hearing his life narrated to him as he lives it.
The narrator, known to the audience but not to Harold, is writer Karen Eiffel played by the ever-improving Emma Thompson. Karen, or Kay to her colleagues, is suffering from writer’s block in that she cannot decide how she will kill her main character. Harold is distraught at the news of his “imminent death” and seeks the help of a literature professor.
The cast becomes even more impressive when two-time Academy Award winner Dustin Hoffman enters in as the coffee guzzling Prof. Jules Hilbert. The Professor tries as best as possible to aid the desperate Harold in discovering what kind of story his is, comedy or tragedy, and who the author might be. The nature of his life is hard for Harold to pin down due to his recent interactions with bakery owner Ana Pascal.
Ana’s character could have been half-heartedly thrown on screen by some second rate actress, but I’m happy to report that it wasn’t. Instead we get Maggie Gyllenhaal in her best performance yet. I’m generally skeptical of actors and actresses who come into the lime light on the tail of a family member, as exciting as it sounds nepotism is not always the most successful venture. Whether Maggie Gyllenhaal is the exception or the rule makes very little difference when it comes to her latest performance.
She is a tough business owner but also a caring sweet sort of person who can’t help but make cookies for the IRS agent auditing her, even after she has spent the day making his job as difficult as possible.
Not one of the performers overshadows another, and not one of them gives less than an excellent performance. The weight of the project, then, falls on director Marc Forster to take an interesting story and all these great performances and turn them into a worthwhile film. With such movies as “Monster’s Ball” and “Finding Neverland” in his portfolio Forster was more than capable of turning out such a movie, and though it seemed too good to be true, “Stranger Than Fiction” winds up being just as remarkable as it ought to be.
It’s more than just a quirky comedy, it’s a well imagined and thought provoking movie that amuses the audience but gives them credit for having enough brain cells to consider the point it has to make. It’s almost unfair that once again this “good film after good film” season has come again. We are spoiled, as each weekend there is some new highly praised offering at the theater. But if you tire of hearing never ending four-star reviews, just remember that Oscar season will be over, and before you even know it we’ll be back to the regular lambasting of atrocious movies. For now, enjoy the good things Hollywood has to offer. Who’d have thought that Will Ferrell trying to coax words from his toothbrush could be one of these good things?

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