The Truman Show for Bookworms

Rating: 5/10 (5 April 2007)

"Stranger than Fiction" is a clever film that tries  and for the most part succeeds  blurring the line between literary fiction and reality. It deals with ponderous questions such as life and death and love and living in a humorous, quirky way. Director Marc Forster's "Stay," a more experimental albeit heavy-handed exploration of similar themes, which perhaps, if nothing else, indicated Forster's own personal obsessions.
"Stranger than Fiction" is about a nondescript IRS man, Harold Crick (Will Ferrell struggling in a dramatic role) who begins to hear the voice of a narrator in his head. He soon realises, as do we, that the voice belongs to an author, Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson, makeup-less), in the process of finishing her new book which is actually Crick's life. The film follows Crick's attempts to foil "his imminent death" as he joins up with Dustin Hoffman's literature professor. In between Harold Crick finds the time to fall in love with Maggie Gyllenhaal's dizzyingly charming Ana, a baker who decided to quit her law education in Harvard to "make this world a better place (by baking cookies)."
The union between Ferrell and Gyllenhaal's characters is a bit unbelievable. Gyllenhaal is very sexy and intelligent (the perfect woman?) while Ferrell's Crick is an obnoxious, disenchanted cubicle nerd. But, I guess, it was meant to be, as the author of the book (and Crick's life) willed it. And herein lies this film's problem: although the juxtaposition of literary clichés with real life is witty, "Stranger than Fiction" ultimately becomes the victim of its own shrewd veneer: it wants to be both a tragedy and a comedy; a metaphysical fable of simple and powerful truisms. Unwilling to compromise between whimsy and gut-wrenching factualism, "Stranger than Fiction" fails at being either.
I illustrate this point, I want to talk about a key scene in the film, but it includes spoilers. Consider yourself warned. The ending has a face-to-face discussion between Dustin Hoffman professor and Emma Thompson's narrator/author. Apparently, she has decided to change the ending; you know, not kill Harold Crick in her story. Being the consummate artiste, disappointed, the professor asks her why.
Author: "Lots of reasonsbecause I realised I just couldn't do it." Professor: "Because he's real?" Author: "Because it (the book) is about a man who doesn't know he's about to die, and dies. But if a man does know that he's about to die, and he dies willingly, knowing that he could stop itisn't that the type of man you'd like to keep alive?"
Hoffman's professor notes that by changing the ending  by saving Harold Crick  Karen Eiffel's book will not achieve the greatness it would have otherwise. He tells her that her book will be "just OK." To which she responds: "You know, I think I'm fine with OK."
We must accept "Stranger than Fiction" as OK too.