Stranger Than Fiction (2006) ****

 

This is another movie that snuck by me back when it came out. Truth is, it took me a while to warm up to Will Ferrell. He always seemed to stretch his jokes out a couple of beats too long. So, back in the 'oughts, I wasn't actively avoiding Will Ferrell movies, but I wasn't actively seeking them out, either. Turns out this is one I should have watched.

Ferrell plays Harold Crick, a strait-laced, regimented, single man who works for the IRS. With a rain-man-like capacity for numbers, Harold quietly counts everything, and he does everything the same way from day to day. He sounds like a character in a book, which is exactly what he is. Harold is the main character in the latest project by author Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), who is suffering writer's block.

What interrupts Harold's quiet existence is that he starts to hear Karen's narration in his head. He, of course, thinks he is going crazy at first, and a psychiatrist agrees, but Harold correctly guesses that his problem is literary, not psychiatric. He seeks help from the most obvious source, a professor of literature (Dustin Hoffman). Meanwhile, the “plot” of Harold's life brings him a love interest in the form of Maggie Gyllenhaal, but also a shock, as his narrator casually mentions his impending death.

Over the years, I have to come to appreciate Will Ferrell's comedy, but “Stranger Than Fiction” proves that he has some serious dramatic chops. It would have been tempting to either tip too far into pathos with Harold or to ham it up and do typical Will Ferrell gags. Instead, he plays Harold with restraint and subtlety, creating a seriously great, everyman character in the midst of an existential crisis. Ferrell gets a hand up, of course, from an outstanding supporting cast. Thompson, Gyllenhaal, and Hoffman would bring class to any project, and Queen Latifah and Tony Hale (from “Arrested Development”) bring the goods as well.

Writer Zach Helm has created here a very Gogol-esque story in that Harold's circumstances seem quite absurd, but actually stand in for everyone's life. Harold discovers that his fate is not his own, and he desperately reaches out to his creator for mercy. Like Harold,we are each the hero of our own story, and every one of those stories is both a comedy and a tragedy.

4 stars out of 5