Review: Stranger Than Fiction

Or: A Little Bit of Literary Theory is a Dangerous Thing. I’ve seen worse films in 2006, but few have made me physically squirm so often with the shallow and stretched quality of their core conceit: that glum IRS accountant Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), insofar as he’s a human being at all, exists in the imagination of a highly annoying, chain-smoking and we suspect not very talented author of death-obsessed novels about The Way We Live Now (Emma Thompson, frankly all over the place). Stranger Than Fiction is perilously pleased with itself and has almost nothing to say, but I was at least hoping for a little charm and deftness of tone, some effective comedy, from such an obviously featherweight effort. In the event, Zach Helm’s debut screenplay, which I have a nasty feeling will pick up this year’s easily-pleased Match Point Oscar nomination, is the precise opposite of good Charlie Kaufman (heavy concepts, light touch) in that it handles its wafty, overfamiliar ideas with great clumsy gauntlets by way of pretending they add up to something. Ferrell is fine as a flummoxed nobody, but as Harold runs around trying to decide if his life conforms to comedy or tragedy, we’re yanked from the film’s nominal comparison-points Adaptation or The Truman Show (as if!) to altogether less inspiring memories of Melinda and Melinda. As for Marc Forster, he’s hired the same d.p. and production designer who made his barely-seen Stay (2005) a gruellingly pretentious watch: they’re evidently much bigger fans of art, books, modernist architecture and psychoanalysis than they are of, say, tax officials, which means that while Harold’s apartment and office are of the low-ceilinged, airless variety of your typical drone worker, everyone else’s look almost dangerously hip and urban. (I bet their next film’s some kind of trippy psychological thriller about a boutique hotelier.) Naturally I wanted to like Maggie Gyllenhaal, who played a gold-digging rebel to utter perfection in Don Roos’ Happy Endings, but even her performance as a seditious baker (!) goes instantly wrong here — how does Forster bungle so much, with a cast of this calibre? After this and Stay I’m almost ready to mount a rearguard defence of the admittedly twee Finding Neverland as its director’s least precocious, fussed-over project, but every one of us has more of a life than Harold and, fingers crossed, better things to do with it. C—