A clever fiction that is stranger than fiction...

Rating: 9/10 (20 November 2006)

Stranger than Fiction/2006/***1/2
Main Stars: Will Ferrell Emma Thompson Dustin Hoffman Maggie Gyllenhaal Queen Latifah
A clever fiction that is stranger than fiction.
Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction is a pure delight. Writer Zach Helm shows us his intellect by writing this movie and succeeding rather well. Before seeing this movie, my crazy predictions were telling me that this movie is just going to be about this well organized guy that has a narrator narrating his life "accurately and with a better vocabulary". However, the story goes much beyond that, and shows us that Will Ferrell is THE perfect actor to portray Harold Crick. Harold Crick is SUPPOSED to be a fictionalized character in Karen Eifel's (Emma Thompson's) new novel. What Karen doesn't know is that her character is a REAL person. The real Harold Crick is an IRS agent who has a rebellious IRS client Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who just doesn't want to pay (in her words) "unnecessary taxes". He tries as nice as possible to make her to. She wouldn't. The movie flips between scenes with Karen Eifel and Harold Crick very frequently. The Karen Eifel scenes are disturbing in some ways because she is a messed up author who smokes and drinks. When you think about it, she's basically playing a TRUE author, because a lot are messed up. A lot of authors in the world today are just a bit "off" in how they get their ideas. In her case, she sees a fruit rolling down the road and it gives her an idea on how to kill Harold Crick. It shows she does have an imagination but an imagination so "out there" like, a perfect example, Stephen King. The movie is a comedy-drama, and it even has scenes where Harold uses a journal to find out if his life is a comedy or a tragedy. He puts a tally mark under Comedy if something comedic just came about, or he puts a tally mark under Tragedy if something somewhat tragic came about. He uses this as an experiment to see what kind of story Eifel is writing, that is after he finds out she's writing a story about him. He goes for help a couple of times to find out if he's losing it. One person told him if he's hearing voices in his head, then he's suffering from schizophrenia and should go on qualified medication. Others were of no help until he went to a literary professor named Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) who was very humorous in this movie and played his part perfectly. Crick was insisting help from Hilbert. Hilbert asks him loads of unnecessary questions, including, "What's your favorite word?" Crick replies, "Integer." Funny, yet not helping his situation a bit. Plus, this might interfere with his love for Ana Pascal. Crick is desperate and doesn't know what to do now that he finds out that Karen Eifel is going to kill him. Will Eifel kill him? If she did it would be a very depressing ending, especially since Crick is such a kind person in this film. And after a little while in this film, Crick stops thinking about counting his brush strokes from top to bottom and from left to right, and stops thinking about counting his steps before work and catching the bus at the exact time. His wristwatch is one to keep him so organized. And the story is about him and his wristwatch. And he is an organized person. But what happens when your wristwatch goes bad. You might not get up at the exact time in the morning or get somewhere at the exact time you need to. You lose your perfectionism after that. I would focus on life a little more too if I knew I was going to die. You shouldn't worry about the trivial things in life, but the important things in life. He had many important things in his life and had even more when he stopped worrying about being perfect. Do Karen Eifel and her assistant Penny Escher (Queen Latifah) (who helps her find an ending because she has writer's block) know that she is writing a story about a REAL LIFE person? It is not my job to tell you, but it's your job to find out. Movie directed by Marc Forster.