Bad fiction

Rating: 4/10 (1 April 2007)

The central idea of 'Stranger than Fiction' is an increasingly fashionable one in movies at the moment: that an individual suddenly becomes aware of their existence as a character in someone else's book. This idea can be milked for straight comedy, or used to ask profound questions about the nature of existence or writing. Unfortunately, 'Stranger than Fiction' has some value as a straight rom-com, but meets all the expectations of the clichés of the genre, and while this is part of the point, the story is insufficiently clever to render this a satisfying conceit. More seriously, the film asks no profound questions about life or literature whatsoever. In one scene, for example, Dustiin Hoffman's professor takes an interest in the case because the narrator has used the expression "Little did he know..." - "I've written books on 'Little did he know'", says Hoffman, but there's no discussion of what he might have written about this formulation. And above all else, Emma Thompson's author is meant to to be a brilliant writer, but the excerpts we here from her narration are so uniformly dreadful that the pretence cannot be sustained: if Will Ferrall's character has a justifiable complaint, it is not at being a character in a novel per se, rather being caught in a story so bad. Moreover, nothing about the writing process as depicted convinces. As the film fades into a feel-good ending, I was left feeling cold: there's nothing in this take on the theme that adds anything to previous treatments.