Intriguing but coopted by H'wood romanticism

Rating: 6/10 (10 March 2008)

For me, the big surprise of this film was that Will Ferrell was actually watchable, exhibiting very little of the "Ick" factor that he usually exudes as one of the most unattractive and pathetically unfunny performers in cinema and television. I'd be delighted if his role in this film convinced him that comedy has been a big, big error in his life. Emma Thompson was fantastic; Hoffman more or less lent the film one of his second-hand performances that he wasn't using anymore and was just cluttering up one of the closets at home. The premise is extremely intriguing, but didn't end up in the most intellectually stimulating place, devolving instead, in the film's last 15 minutes, into a sort of sappy, predictable Hollywood romance. ***SPOILERS FOLLOW*** There's a sort of logical hole in the premise (if Karen Eiffel "knows" everything, because she's writing it, she knows that Crick is going to phone and visit her, she knows that Prof. Hilbert knows who she is because she's "written" the scenes in which Crick talks to Hilbert, etc.), but the interesting part of the plot SHOULD have been  and here is where the comment on the way literature "enters" into our lives and we "enter" into literature could have been truly incisive  is two-fold: (a) not everything in Crick's life, obviously, is "controlled" by Eiffel, which only makes sense, otherwise "reality" becomes a hall of mirrors (Eiffel is writing Eiffel writing Crick); and (b) the difference between fictional characters and "real" life is that characters in novels and stories can never do anything differently but "real" people can. The film kind of mudges over this philosophical point in order to "save" Crick.