You could be forgiven for finding the idea of a comedy from the director of Monster’s Ball a slightly worrying prospect. And sure enough, Stranger than Fiction would have to be classed as bittersweet – or perhaps, in keeping with its subject, as tragic-comic. If you’re the kind of person that likes your films easily-pigeonholeable then you might have problems with Marc Foster’s latest, because it’s hard to tell if even its director knows exactly what it wants to be.
IRS Auditor Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) wakes up one morning to find his every action being narrated by a voice that only he can hear. He soon realises that he’s a character in someone else’s story, which is bad enough but becomes a whole lot more worrying when he discovers that his onboard narrator is plotting to kill him off. While he seeks the help of Dustin Hoffman’s literature professor and falls in love with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s tax-dodging baker, across town his creator, Emma Thompson, struggles with writer’s block and battles with implausibly-cast writer’s assistant Queen Latifah.
Similarly post-modern tales of the fine line between art and reality have taken various directions, from the navel-gazing of Adaptation to the smug rom-com of Sliding Doors to the something-in-between of Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda. Stranger than Fiction is faintly reminiscent of all of the above, purely because it leaves no aspect of its concept unexplored – it rushes headlong down every philosophical avenue, taking pot-shots at the relationship between writer and subject and art and life and veering like its protagonist between extremes of comedy and tragedy.
By the same measure, there’s a vague but constant sense that everyone is acting in a different film: Thompson gives an angst-ridden and deeply eccentric performance that threatens to overbalance the movie, Ferrell plays his part with understated, charming bafflement, and Hoffman steals most of the laughs by recycling his character from I Heart Huckabees. The script is also uneven – strong on ideas and dialogue, weaker on the narration, which is more reminiscent of Jackie Collins than the work of a literary master. But because Foster has the sense to let his cast get on with their thing so long as they give great performances, Stranger than Fiction spends most of its running time being far better than its mcguffin of a starting point might suggest.
At its heart is the surprisingly tender and plausible romance between Ferrell and Gyllenhaal, which is so well-played and downright sweet that it totally overwhelms the middle part of the film. Around that point the central conceit starts to drag, Queen Latifah becomes overly irritating, and you start to wish that the love-birds could be left to get on with it without having to worry about any metaphysical swords of Damocles. But given how nigh-impossible a satisfactory conclusion seems to be – it’s a safe bet that Harold Crick will either live or die – Foster manages to wrap things up satisfyingly, and to tie up most of the existential loose ends.
If Stranger than Fiction isn’t quite as smart as it thinks it is and ultimately doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, it at least it has a few interesting things to say, and it’s full of neat ideas – the best being the Radiohead-album-cover graphics that flash up occasionally to represent Harold’s anally-retentive inner world. There’s an argument that it might have been better as two completely separate films, leaving Thompson and Ferrell to do their things without so much toe-treading. But as it is you’re left with a fun, intriguing oddity that’s well worth a look as one of the year’s more intriguing experiments.