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Stranger Than Fiction Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some disturbing images, sexuality, brief language and nudity) Genre: Comedy, Drama Theater release: November 10, 2006 by Columbia Pictures Directed by: Marc Forster Runtime: 1 hour 53 minutes Cast: Will Ferrell (Harold Crick), Emma Thompson (Kay Eiffel), Dustin Hoffman (Jules Hilbert), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Ana Pascal), Queen Latifah (Penny Escher), Linda Hunt (Dr. Mittag-Leffler), Tom Hulce (Dr. Cayly), Kristin Chenoweth (Anchorwoman) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Is Harold Crick living in a comedy, or a tragedy? That's the question Harold himself tries to answer in Stranger Than Fiction, a story about a man who hears a voice narrating his everyday activities and making ominous predictions about his future, as though he were a character in a novel and the voice were its author.

It is also the question that many moviegoers may ask when they sit down to watch Stranger Than Fiction. The film stars Will Ferrell, the Saturday Night Live alumnus who is best known for playing outrageously cartoonish characters like Ron Burgundy and Ricky Bobby—but it never feels like a Will Ferrell comedy. True, it is kind of quirky, but it is also rather sad and melancholic. Like Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love, Ferrell is playing a character who resembles some of his other roles, but he reins in any urge he might have had to ham things up; instead, he puts his skills to the service of an ambitious story told by a filmmaker who truly knows his craft.

Will Ferrell gets serious and dramatic as Harold Crick

So, to the story. Harold Crick is an IRS agent whose life is little more than a string of dull, dreary, methodical routines. Every morning he brushes his teeth a certain number of times, and he walks a certain number of steps across the street to catch his bus—and the film annotates his activities with pop-up diagrams that track his every move. Harold's activities are described to us by a female voice-over narrator—and then, one morning, Harold hears the voice for himself. At first this is merely annoying, and it drives Harold nuts—but then the woman's voice makes a cryptic reference to Harold's imminent death, and Harold begins to fear for his life.

The voice belongs to Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), a novelist who has a bad case of writer's block; the problem is so bad, in fact, that the publisher has sent her an assistant named Penny Escher (Queen Latifah) to goad her into finishing her latest book. We learn that Kay has a reputation for killing off her main characters, and the reason her current novel is stuck in limbo is because she can't figure out how to bump off the main character—who just happens to be Harold Crick.

Emma Thompson as Kay Eiffel, who really knows how to get inside her characters' heads

Movies about fictional artists often falter when they portray the work produced by those artists, especially when the films go out of their way to try to persuade us that the artists in question are really brilliant; once we see or hear the work of art for ourselves, we may not be so convinced. To some degree, Stranger Than Fiction falls into this trap, because we hear enough of Kay's narration to get the impression that it isn't particularly special. For one thing, there isn't enough material there for an entire novel; it barely qualifies as a short story. And Harold is such a lifeless robot, at first, that he only really becomes interesting when he fights against her words.

For assistance, Harold turns to a literary prof named Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), who creates a test to narrow down the possible range of genres to which Harold's life story might belong. Harold also happens to be auditing—and falling in love with—an idealistic baker named Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal), so he takes notes every time they meet, tallying the moments between them that seem to point towards a happy ending and those which seem to point towards something more tragic. Of course, since he works for the IRS, and she withheld a portion of her taxes to protest government policies, the relationship might seem doomed; then again, romantic comedies often start with couples hating each other's guts, so who knows?

Maggie Gyllenhaal as Ana Pascal, whom Harold is 'auditing'

The movie's central gimmick is so full of potential holes, and the film spends so little time explaining it, that it's probably best not to think about it too much. (What does Harold hear when Kay writes a sentence that covers an hour's, day's, or even week's worth of his life? What does he hear when she writes an entire paragraph or two to describe something that took him only a few seconds to do? Why do none of the other characters in Kay's book hear her voice? Why does Kay seem oblivious to the fact that Harold's actions are increasingly motivated by the fact that he can hear her? What happens when she revises what she has written? That sort of thing.)

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