Third Person Omniscient.

Rating: 7/10 (6 September 2008)

This fantasy begins as a blend of "The Truman Show" with a soupçon of "The Accidental Tourist" and I expected a tricky commercial property designed in the course of some overnight caffeine binge to bring in as many shekels as possible. It's better than that, and I wound up waiting rather tensely to see how the thing would turn out.
Will Ferrell is an obsessive-compulsive IRS auditor who lives a heavily regimented life, dictated by the reminders on his multiple-function wrist watch, joyless and humorless. He's as boring as they come. We just KNOW some hot babe or something is going to turn his life upside down, and it does.
He begins to hear a woman's voice inside his head. The voice describes what he's doing and what he has done, down to the smallest detail, using the third person or his actual name -- Harold Crick. Something is going on but Ferrell doesn't know what. The voice at first puzzles him, then irritates him. He shouts out demands that it stop, but the only things that stop are other pedestrians who stare at him. Actually, this being New York, I think he could stand in the street and shout all he likes without any interference.
I don't want to spell out all the plot developments because the story is a little complicated. Ferrell sees a shrink, Linda Hunt, who refers him to a professor of literature, Dustin Hoffman, who may be able to figure out what kind of narrative he's listening to -- and living. It's a tragedy, as it turns out, and Ferrell had better find out whose writing it before he's killed off. The writer turns out to be real enough, a blocked novelist, Emma Thompson, and Ferrell tracks her down and they work things out, so to speak. There's the inevitable spirit-of-life woman too, Maggie Gyllenhaal, who introduces him to love, milk and cookies, and Tiffany lamps. With this kind of narrative it's only natural to ask if the "writer" stands for Somebody Else. I mean, here is someone laying out the course of a human life. Is Thompson God? Can God be a woman who has writer's block and smokes too much? Nahh. Woman, yes. Writer's block and smoking, no.
The best performances are from Emma Thompson, Byllenhall, and Dustin Hoffman. Will Ferrell looks and acts the part of a man whose favorite word is "integer" but he does so uninterestingly. On the other hand, it's a tough part. Maybe Bill Murray would have handled it.
In a plot as tricky as this there are bound to be lacunae in the logic. For instance, he's trying to track down the genuine source of the voice in his head. He discovers the voice seems to belong to a real writer. But the voice has used some strange locutions. I'd have started my investigation by Googling the word "unmitigatable." See who's used it before. There couldn't be that many.
And then too, Ferrell finally finds and confronts the author of his life, Emma Thompson, takes the almost-finished manuscript to Dustin Hoffman, and it is agreed by all concerned that the story must end tragically with Ferrell's death. Nonsense. Why couldn't Thompson have written the thing as a tragedy then added a single, final sentence -- "And he woke up to find it had all been a dream"? It worked in Fritz Lang's "Woman in the Window." And as for literature, "Finnegans Wake" is ALL dream.
Plaudits to the writer though. There's some clever stuff going on here, which overcomes occasional distractions in the direction. It's too bad that Ferrell is as unengaging as he is. He's even uninteresting when he wises up and begins to stretch out. There seems to be a big hole in the screen when he appears, and he's the central figure.
The movie may be a little too charmed by its own premise. Still -- overall -- it's a more thoughtful film than you might anticipate, not as gimmicky as it sounds. Would have made a good novel.