A pretentious, irritating film

Rating: Null/10 (25 November 2006)

I never thought I'd see Emma Thompson in a role that made me dislike her, but this film did it. She plays a rude, neurotic novelist who seems compelled to treat people badly without reason. Dustin Hoffman is similarly irritating as a lordly literary don who, despite Ferrell's request for help, seems bored and too busy to really give a damn about whether the troubled IRS auditor lives or dies. An added irritant: Hoffman doesn't make a move without a coffee cup or coffee pot in his hand (coffee swilling has become the successor to the compulsory cigarette smoking of the older movies).
Maggie Gyllenhaal is fetching as the love interest, but I liked her a lot more in the first half - when she was giving Ferrell a hard time - than later when she falls for him and turns into a fawning teen-ager.
If the novelist did indeed have the power to determine the fate of Ferrell, she surely chose a cruel and painful alternative to actually killing him off.
This film tried to be clever, inventive and message-laden, but to me it pretty much failed.