Put a damper on Will Ferrell’s antics and you’re left with a wholly unremarkable presence. Which is why casting him as Harold Crick in Stranger Than Fiction was an inspired stroke. A man of numbers and schedules, Crick is as bland as the digits scrolling across his IRS computer screen—emotionless, harmless, and painfully blank.
Until he starts hearing a voice, that is. Specifically, the soothing cadence of a British woman, who one morning starts to narrate Crick’s every move. As we come to find out, the narrator is a writer named Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), currently blocked from finishing her latest opus, the protagonist of which is a dull IRS agent named Harold Crick. Renowned for her thoroughly depressing canon, Eiffel is a chain-smoking cliché, sequestered in her barren upper-class apartment while she plots the perfect way to kill off her latest creation—a plot point Crick the breathing human takes particular umbrage with.
Taken in pieces, Stranger Than Fiction is an often clever and surprisingly emotional work, its quirkiness tempered by unobtrusive guidance from director Marc Forster. But when looked at as a whole, the film’s cleverness proves overwhelming, stranding its characters in a half-baked third act that frays like an old sweater. Philosophy 101 students will no doubt find much to argue over (enabled, handily, by a Yoda-like performance from Dustin Hoffman as a babbling prof), but I suspect the true motivation behind first-time scribe Zach Helm’s screenplay is an overall disdain for the writing process. It’s here that the film’s debt to Charlie Kaufman becomes unavoidable. If you were left cold by the self-loathing machinations of Adaptation, then Stranger Than Fiction should prove to be a tamer, and less complicated, antidote. 