We Never Know When Life Will End, Or How

Rating: 9/10 (25 November 2006)

Stranger Than Fiction is a film written by Zach Helm, a screenwriter who never let there be a dull moment in his dialogue or his story, and that includes the internal mechanics of both. Each character is a much different character than you expected them to be, and very absorbing and compelling that way, creating the film's universe, and because your attention is drawn to a character you've never seen before, you feel much more inclined to get to know them.
I've always found Will Ferrell to be more of a talented actor than just a comedian, or an SNL alum who had a character big enough for the movies, hence happening upon a so-so film career. His characters in his comedies are too brilliantly stupid and wholly created. His timing is impeccable, as you will see in his almost robotically dull character in Stranger Than Fiction, Harold Crick, whose sudden losses of control are hilarious simply because of the contrast to what you've seen of him so far. He's an all-too-real satire of a commonly overlooked sort.
Having recently seen In the Name of the Father, I commented on Emma Thompson's stunning talent as an actress, because I'd re-watched Primary Colors not too long before, and I realized how sparingly one thinks of her as anyone aside from her character. She completely becomes whomever she plays, like a chameleon. I see her now in Stranger Than Fiction and I realize the same thing about In the Name of the Father. Each film I see her in, the more I like her. She has a scene in this film that stands out, an interview her character gives on a network talk show, her host being a young bimbo whose lack of knowledge she finds so aggravating that she can't help from showing it in the expression of the answers she gives her, and she is hilarious.
Dustin Hoffman does the opposite. As in Confidence, he's playing sort of a caricature of himself or a variation on his own personality rather than becoming a different one like in Rain Man or most of his earliest work. This doesn't detract from his performance however, though I've always enjoyed him as one of the few classic contemporary actors with the charisma that influences so many actors of later generations who actually does play many different people and explore many different genres and characters, as opposed to other great actors in that category---Pacino, De Niro, Nicholson, Penn---who take generally relative roles and infuse their own personas into them.
The visual style of this film is very smart, conveying Harold Crick's mental state, as a mentally refined, all-too-reserved fellow who sees the world in numbers, systems and mechanisms everywhere he goes and fails to see life in other ways. The director, Marc Forster, shows us this as Crick goes through his daily algorithms and we see elegant diagrams and word groups with pointing lines, math problems done corresponding to his pondering through them. These image accompaniments don't necessarily face the audience, though they sometimes appear to be. Rather, they are facing Crick himself.
It may seem odd that I analyze this film so much and study it so meticulously. When you see it, you'll realize that it truly is not just another blueprint zany comedy. It is one of the most intelligent and most well-made Hollywood films this year.