Fell just short of Greatness!

Rating: 7/10 (25 November 2006)

Last night we went to see "Stranger than Fiction" which, by all reviews, promised to be a fabulous experience and a refreshing movie plot we had not seen before.
In fact, everything was in place for this to be a GREAT movie...a well crafted story, great performances by Will Ferrel, Emma Thompson, Dustin Hoffman and Maggie Gyllenhal, a great soundtrack and a very fresh and new kind of cinematography which illustrated the main character's obsession with numbers.
As the movie started and the plot began to unfold I was immediately drawn into a main character, Harold Crick, that you easily come to love and route for. And the story was interesting and different enough to hold your attention. Up to this point the only drawback was a very unnecessary placement of Queen Latifa as a writer's assistant....a role with no magic, which could have served it's purpose just as well by Emma Thompson speaking into a tape recorder.
Yes, everything was in place for movie greatness and sadly, the last 1/3 of the movie fell flat as a pancake for me. I wish I could go in depth into what made the movie fail at the end, but to do so I would have to ruin the plot twists and ending, so I can't. But I will say this in an abstract way. All of the well-executed components of the movie had successfully made the viewer feel a certain way about the life of the main character and then, in the 11th hour, everything you have been built up to root for is switched and the movie tries to force you to completely change your way of thinking about what is valuable in this particular story...leaving me feeling let down and a bit confused.
The movie's end could have been triumphant if the ending had been less morbid or even more morbid, but the middle path they chose was almost disconcerting and held the meaning of the movie back from what it could have been. In vain the writers tried to tie up it's ending with a few musings by the "author" writing the fictional story, but it falls way short of being reflective, deep or meaningful like it so easily could have been. In the car on the way home we could have talked about insights about life the movie offered and instead we talked about what the ending SHOULD have been to match the build-up of first 2/3 of the movie. While the movie isn't bad by any means, it is definitely short of greatness.