Life and Art Clash for a Sad Sack Tax Auditor in a Kaufman-Lite Fantasy Dramedy

Rating: 7/10 (12 December 2006)

Put-upon protagonist Harold Crick appears to exist in the same absurdist universe as screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's off-center characters in "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation". It is not Kaufman, however, who penned the creative script here but rather Zach Helm, whose fertile imagination drives this fatalistic 2006 dramedy. Directed with a nice contemporary panache by the increasingly versatile Marc Forster, the fantasy-driven film focuses on Harold's sadly mundane existence as an emotionally unavailable, anal-retentive tax auditor for the IRS.
One morning, he hears a particularly erudite voice describe his life with real-time precision and zealous literacy. Harold desperately seeks out the source, first by speaking with the unctuous office psychiatrist and then by eliciting the help of an eccentric literature professor, Dr. Jules Hilbert. It turns out to be the voice of author Karen Eiffel, who has been undergoing writer's block for nearly a decade, a situation alarming enough to her publishing company that they send a foolproof assistant to ensure a final manuscript is delivered. In the meantime, Harold finds himself drawn to a high-spirited, non-conformist bakery owner named Ana in the middle of a testy, confrontational audit. But the more serious problem is that Harold is the main character in Eiffel's nearly completed novel, and she always kills off her heroes in her books.
How Helm and Forster resolve this fanciful dilemma is the best part of the movie because they build the far-fetched convolutions toward a satisfying emotional resonance. If the rest of the set-up doesn't reach the dizzying high-wire act of Kaufman's best work, the film still has genuinely clever plot turns and moments of creative momentum. In a reflective seriocomic performance, Will Ferrell proves he has the acting chops to handle the gravity of Harold's dilemma, even if he has to act constrained most of the time. Emma Thompson manages to capture Eiffel's angst-ridden reclusive nature with her familiar sardonic aplomb.
As Ana, Maggie Gyllenhaal finally has a role worthy of her ripened, effortlessly coquettish persona. Playing a more deadpan variation of his bumbling sleuth in "I Heart Huckabees", Dustin Hoffman nicely underplays Hilbert. Queen Latifah has relatively little to do as Eiffel's assistant Penny, but she does it with authority. With this accomplished film, Forster really shows a flair for balancing the whimsical with the tangible that drive Helm's charmingly inventive story.