A major disappointment

Rating: 4/10 (14 August 2007)

I was expecting great things from this. "Stranger Than Fiction" has been lauded by the critics, but unfortunately it never lives up to its reputation. While Will Ferrell's performance is strong, the script suffers from a lack of true invention; its intriguing central premise is never fully exploited, instead becoming bogged down in the same old tired romantic comedy conventions. Ferrell's and Gyllenhaal's characters are so patently incompatible that their relationship never rings true. Dustin Hoffman plays another cookie cutter eccentric who's not nearly as interesting as the screenwriter thinks he is (see "I Heart Huckabees" for another example of this) and Emma Thompson's character is simply annoying, a stereotype of an "important" novelist who just comes across as maudlin and self-absorbed. Indeed, it is her character's voice over narration which robs this film of its credibility: she is supposed to be a novelist of major talent and importance, a writer whose work is the subject of academic study and fevered reverence; yet the language she uses in her narration is so full of trite clichés and amateurish idiom (she uses expressions like "But little did he know" and "he found himself standing outside the building") that anyone with even a passing interest in or knowledge of "proper" literature will find it laughable. The audience is asked to believe that she is Jane Austen when in fact she writes like a housewife who's taken one evening class in creative writing; a hugely irritating flaw which, for this viewer, almost rendered the film unwatchable. There are one or two striking visual moments and Ferrell's character is given a couple of funny lines, but on the whole this film is a major disappointment. It is as though, in attempting to give it a broader appeal, screenwriter Zach Helm has smoothed away all its rough edges. With an R rating and a good deal more imagination, it could have been truly innovative; instead it must go down as a wasted opportunity.