Charlie Kaufman lite

Rating: Null/10 (16 July 2007)

In "Stranger than fiction", directed by Marc Foster ("Monsters' ball", "Finding neverland"), Harold Crick (a dead serious Will Ferrell, playing against type) is an IRS auditor, living a routine boring life. Everything changes when he starts hearing a voice narrating his life as if he was the main character of a novel. Past the initial shock, this seems to be a good thing as Harold break up with his routine, opening himself to the external world as well as dating a young liberal-minded baker (Maggie Gyllenhaal) he has fallen in love with. But then, he realizes the narrator is Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), a reclusive author who always kills her main character.
Penned by Zach Helm, the script obviously tries to imitate the style of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman ("Being John Malkovitch", "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind") and the whole movie tries actually to ape the subtle mix between comedy, drama, absurdness and attempt at existentialist insight that can be found in a Charlie Kaufman movie. But the premise is a little too much out there: it would OK if "strangers than fiction" was a straight comedy but there is too much drama for us to take "stranger than fiction" as seriously as it takes itself.
Moreover, even if you buy the premise, the movie ultimately fails. Interestingly, in a strange post-modern twist, the reasons why the movie failed are discussed in the movie itself! Once Karen Eiffel realizes that Harold Crick is not only a character in her latest novel but a real human being, she is faced with a dilemma: either killing Crick and hence writing a masterpiece or letting him live and hence ruining her novel. She chooses the latest option. This is exactly the situation faced by the screenwriter of "stranger than fiction": he could have decided to kill Harold Crick, hence maybe not transforming the movie into a masterpiece but at least making it more satisfying that the current version with its saccharine Hollywood happy ending where Crick lives to get the girl.
In those sequences where Eiffel hesitates between the two possible ending for her book, it is if the screenwriter was telling us"Hey, I know the story is better if I kill Crick. But hey, this is Hollywood, this is a business: there is no way this movie can make any profit with a sad ending so I had to go the other way."