“Little did he know that events had been set in motion that would lead to his imminent death.”

Sounds interesting, right? Not when you’re the “he” in question. This is the exact problem facing Harold Crick (Will Ferrell); he wakes up one morning and suddenly hears the cool, collected voice of an Englishwoman narrating every aspect of his life (with a few nasty bits of foreshadowing thrown in).

Stranger than Fiction is a decisive step forward for Ferrell; a mainstay on Saturday Night Live for seven years, he recently branched out (and quite successfully, too) into the world of feature films. The movies he’s made have been chiefly comedies (no one will mistake his newsroom antics in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy for high drama) but Ferrell hasn’t been restricted to goof ball characters, either; he’s appeared in Winter Passing, a somber indie flick, and Melinda and Melinda, a Woody Allen movie which happens to contain certain thematic elements common to Stranger than Fiction. It is this new film, however, which will firmly establish Will Ferrell as a truly versatile actor.

I’ve always liked Ferrell; he has a knack for throwing himself completely into whichever part he plays—be it a 1970s anchorman, a NASCAR driver, or Lucifer himself—without betraying any hint of being in on the joke. There are indeed a few jokes in Stranger than Fiction, but most of the material is treated seriously—to the film’s credit.

He’s displayed a lot of outlandish behaviour in previous roles, and one might expect Ferrell to go way over the top with the role of a possible schizophrenic, but he never comes close. He gives a subtle, subdued performance, which is absolutely right. A lesser film would have the main character in hysterics in the final act, but Harold carries on with an admirable sense of dignity.

Back to the main story—now that Harold’s death has been foretold by an unseen narrator, what can he do about it? He goes to see a shrink (who ends up being less than helpful) and then seeks help from Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), a literary professor.

It is here that the film explores intriguing territory. If it’s safe to assume that Harold is in some kind of story, Hilbert suggests that Harold try to figure out whether he is in a comedy or a tragedy—after all: if he’s in a comedy, he gets married, and if he’s in a tragedy, he gets buried.

This is Zach Helm’s first screenplay, and it’s quite a clever one—playing with the forms and structures of storytelling itself without once breaking the fourth wall. The scenes with Hoffman and Ferrell are wonderful because they are so fundamentally logical—after all, if a man knew he was a character in a story, of course he’d use everything that is known about literature and literary conventions in order to shape the story’s outcome. Comparisons to Charlie Kaufman are not unfounded; Helm is a screenwriter to watch out for.

In order to nudge his story into the realm of comedy, Harold (an IRS employee) embarks on a relationship with Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the woman he is currently auditing. She tells Harold to “get bent” when they first meet, so how can a relationship between the two not be comedic?

Meanwhile, the author of Harold’s story, Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), is stymied as to how to actually kill Harold, so her publishers bring in an assistant (Queen Latifah) to help her overcome her writer’s block. The assistant may not be worth writing home about, but Thompson as Karen is so interesting that it wouldn’t be inconceivable for her to have carried the picture herself (or to have starred in an Adaptation.-ish film of her own).

Karen is a shell of a human being—a mucous-spewing chain-smoker who daydreams about sudden, violent deaths that she might be able to inflict upon her main characters (who always die at the end of each novel). She receives a memorable (and particularly apt) introduction, standing atop a high-rise and looking down on the people below. She is a godlike figure, and the audience realizes that she would indeed be a god to the characters she is writing.

As Harold moves closer and closer to the end of his story, a sense of doom starts creeping in—helped in no small part by the presence of two characters who seem superfluous, but who just may be part of the grand design. The principal actors do some great work here; Emma Thompson has several scenes near the end which are just heartbreaking.

The plot is intriguing, the characters are engaging; all the elements are in place and they come together to form a memorable little gem of a movie. It’s definitely worth seeing.

Note: I was planning to write this review before seeing the film anyway, but after seeing it, I knew that I absolutely had to write it, if only because of one single event in the film which has to do with our site. You’ll know it when you see it.

Postscript: This review was published (more or less verbatim) on page 13 of the November 23, 2006 edition of The Uniter.

© 2006 Kevin P. Gabel