A Taste to Acquire: In Stranger than Fiction, Will Ferrell after all shows what he came for

Rating: Null/10 (12 January 2007)

In 1995, in his first season in Saturday Night Live, Will Ferrel was voted by the public the worst comedian of the history of the show. Seven years later, when he left the post, was elected by popular vote as the best name of all that has passed through the series, taking off the race competitors like John Belushi and Steve Martin. There is two possible explanations for this discrepancy, and one doesn't exclude the other: Ferrel is a taste you acquire; and he is capable of adapting, improving and learning. In Stranger than Fiction, the validity of the second hypothesis is specially evident. For the first time, Ferrel shows himself less as a comic and more as an actor. In the film directed by Marc Forster, of Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland, he interprets Harold Crick, a blank tax inspector that, in the lack of any clearer meaning in life, replaces it by numbers and method. Harold brushes his teeth 36 times on the vertical, and others 36 times on the horizontal. Chronometers by the seconds the time he has to be at the bus stop, and makes on his tie a simple Windsor knot, because the double knot would consume a whole other minute of his day. The reason that his habits becomes so transparent to him and for the audience is that, in a certain moment, Harold starts to hear a voice inside his head - a woman's voice, British, that narrates every one of his gestures with style, and better choice of words, that he would not be capable of using.
With the help of a literature professor (Dustin Hoffman), Harold discovers that he became the character of a romance that is being written by Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson). In serious existential and creative crisis, the novelist fight to finish her work the way she is known of - by killing the protagonist. Harold, naturally, wants to convince Kay to change the ending. And the movie, written with considerable astuteness and sweetness by scriptwriter Zach Helm, has to show why she should, or not, change her masterpiece to hinder the premature ending of a so insignificant man. The way out of this dead end is above all in the performance of Ferrell, that gives to his usual persona, of the fool who does not know that he is fool (his imitation of George W. Bush is quite famous), a whole new dramatic sense: of even the people which you're used to disdain can hold unsupicious moves of greatness. What goes for the character, and also for his actor.