Dramatic Irony Will Fuck You Every Time
Stranger than Fiction / Dustin Rowles
Film Reviews | November 10, 2006 | Comments (81)
Stranger than Fiction is about love. It’s about free will. About fate. And literary theory. It’s about comedy, and it’s about tragedy. And it’s about Bavarian Crème Cookies. It’s smart, without being intellectual. It’s funny, though not hilarious. Droll, but not too self-aware. And it’s a fucking beautiful film. It’s bittersweet and achy and exhilarating and romantic and absorbing and hopeful and optimistic and, truly, it makes me happy to be a critic with so little to criticize.
Above all, (and unlike 99 percent of the movies that will be made or released this year,) Stranger than Fiction is kind. It’s kind to its characters and kind to its audience, though it’s just smart enough that it’s never earnest. Indeed, there isn’t the tiniest dose of cynicism in the film, and Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Monster’s Ball) knows that any film worth its salt is more than just a whimsical conceit and Will Ferrell, which is why Fiction isn’t really about a man who is a character in his own life. It’s about how that man, Harold Crick (Ferrell) — an IRS Agent who experiences every second of his life embedded in routine — breaks free from monotony thanks to a narrator that speaks to him. If we were all to have our daily lives read back to us as we experience them, we’d probably realize the absurdity of our own routines and acknowledge that the comfort we find in monotony is just a lazy excuse to avoid really living — and I say this as a man who schedules his existence around the first matinée each Friday.
Anyway, Harold Crick wakes up one morning and starts to hear a voice narrating his life. As you might imagine, this is disconcerting, particularly for someone who counts stairs, has an Asperger’s-like awareness of numbers, and whose life revolves around such rigorous planning that he gets to his bus stop each morning only seconds before the bus arrives. But the real question for Crick becomes this: Is the narrator, Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), who is writing the book of Crick’s life, merely transcribing the events (each a product, then, of his free will) or is she actually determining them in the pages of her book, Death and Taxes (determinism). Or, maybe, it’s a bit of both (compatiblism).
Once Crick dismisses the idea of schizophrenia, he seeks out a literary theorist, Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) who helps Crick — by analyzing his experiences — to determine what kind of book he may have found himself in — a comedy or a tragedy. Most of those events involve Crick’s sudden fondness for Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a socialist baker who is being audited for her refusal to pay the percentage of taxes she owes to the government that would go to defense and military spending. Ana’s loathing for Crick (“Get bent, tax man!”) initially suggests tragedy, but there is an underlying affection in her hatred (comedy!). However, the crux of the narrative centers around the fact that one of Eiffel’s pronouncements foreshadows Crick’s “imminent demise.” Obviously, Crick doesn’t want to die — particularly as his life becomes increasingly eventful — and his efforts to track down the narrator occur just as he’s discovering a new appreciation for life and a desire to do the things he’s always wanted to do. Sure, it’s cliché as hell. But, goddamnit, it works — and the best part of Stranger than Fiction is that, unlike what you’d believe from the premise, it never gets so cute you wanna retch.
Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman are, as always, amazing — Hoffman’s scenes with Ferrell are flat-out magnificent. Maggie Gyllenhaal radiates, as usual, and elevates her character far above an almost typical romantic lead, somehow making her relationship with Ferrell not only believable, but natural — no easy task when mixing and matching a Marxist pastry chef and an IRS Agent. Ferrell haters will probably have a difficult time believing this, but he is remarkable. There is something about his sad-faced man-child vulnerability and the way it works with his gibberish-free deadpan that makes him both sympathetic and accessible as a mainstream drone. He’s the lynchpin to the entire conceit, and whatever preconceived notions we have about Ferrell actually work to the benefit of the film. With him on board, it’s easy to overlook the fact that you’re enjoying an adult comedy and his performance is so effortless, you forget how difficult it must have been to put this premise in motion, much less to do it so efficiently (there are no throwaway scenes in Stranger than Fiction — like a good book, everything moves the narrative forward).
The truth is, as much as I love films — even the very worst ones — there is nothing I like better than a great, or even a substantially good, piece of writing. And Stranger than Fiction may be the first movie I’ve ever seen that made me feel like I was reading, even as I was watching Will Ferrell brush his teeth and wrap his necktie into a single Windsor knot. There are certain contrivances, particular phraseology, and plot developments that only work in fiction, which is why so many books translate so poorly onscreen. But in a way, I think, Stranger with Fiction feels like a movie written for the page — if that makes any sense. And hell, there’s just something about an omniscient narrator that rocks my world.
Honestly, Stranger than Fiction is neither the best, the funniest, nor the most important movie of the year, but it may be the most heartfelt and entertaining. And it’s certainly one of my favorites.
Dustin Rowles is the publisher of Pajiba. He is currently halfway through a three-year ‘sentence’ in upstate, NY, where he lives with his wife. You may email him, or leave a comment below.
Comments
Posted by: Sarah at November 10, 2006 4:41 PM
Yay! I've been looking forward to this.