A Creative and New Examination of Old Questions

Rating: 7/10 (7 April 2007)

Harold Crick lives a boring life of dull routine and never seems to entertain the notion that any other kind of life is a possibility. He quietly gets up every morning, catches the same bus to work, spends his day auditing people who hate him (he's an IRS agent), comes home, goes to bed and repeats everything the next day. His life is carefully synchronized by his trusty wristwatch, possibly and sadly Harold's best friend. His daily comings and goings are narrated to us by the pleasant, British accented voice of God, or at least of Emma Thompson. But one day, a seemingly ordinary Wednesday, Harold begins to hear the same narration that we hear, including a passing mention of his impending death. Harold's the main character in a novel, you see, and Emma Thompson is not an omniscient god, but rather the author of the novel. Though, as the movie hints, perhaps they're the same thing.
I went into "Stranger Than Fiction" with significant reservations. The movie belongs to the same genre as films like "Adaptation," "Being John Malkovich" and "The Truman Show," metaphysical musings on subjects like free will, the act of creation and such, all films which I found to be a bit too clever for their own good and which ultimately could not deliver on the promise of their imaginative concepts. But "Stranger Than Fiction" handles its topic quite well, and it's a very good movie. Once Harold realizes that his creator intends for him to die, he sets out to change the course of events of his life, not sure whether or not such a thing is even possible. He's helped by the fact that he's found something worth living for, that something being a feisty baker played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who brings a tremendous amount to the film through her nimble performance and engaging screen presence, and he enlists the help of a university literature professor cum therapist played by Dustin Hoffman, who helps Harold unravel the mystery of who's writing the book about him. Meanwhile, Thompson enters into a crisis of her own. She can't figure out how to kill off Harold Crick, and just as she comes up with a perfect and poetic way for him to die, she discovers that Harold knows who she is and that she's in control, and suddenly the act of killing him off becomes infinitely complicated by the fact that a real human life is in her hands.
There's much about this film that doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you think about it for too long. For example, if Harold is a fictional character living in a fictional universe created by an author, then why isn't everyone else he interacts with fictional too? Also, the death Thompson devises for Harold isn't that original, so one wonders why exactly she had so much trouble coming up with it in the first place. But the questions about the moral responsibility of creators for their creations, and the reverse questions about the freedom of creations to determine their own fate, though not exactly new, are at least given a fresh coating of paint here, and the slick direction by Marc Forster helps the film and its ideas go down easily. It's not as intellectually ambitious as movies like "Adaptation" or "Being John Malkovich," but in spite of that, or maybe because of it, I enjoyed this film more.
Grade: A-