- Stranger Than Fiction pulls off two successful castings-against-type that I would have thought impossible. First, it features Will Ferrell in a convincing semi-serious role. Plenty of actors famous for their rubber-faced idiocy have tried this in the past (I'm looking at you, Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey!), but Ferrell is better than most. Second and perhaps more surprising, the film manages to make Emma Thompson seem repulsive and inelegant. I've always thought of Thompson as a talented actress, but I never thought she could pull off ugly. After seeing her spit into a kleenex to extinguish a cigarette, I'll admit that I was wrong. The film also features Maggie Gyllenhaal as a sexy indie-rock type, Dustin Hoffman as a mumbling professor, Queen Latifah as a no-nonsense businesswoman, Linda Hunt as a psychiatrist, and Tony Hale as an awkward Star Trek fan, but those are much less revolutionary choices.
- The story is organized around the high-concept idea that a character from a novel is alive and can hear the narration. The character, Harold Crick (Ferrell), is an I.R.S. agent who brushes his teeth and catches his bus with Swiss precision. As part of his job, he audits anti-establishment types like Ana Pascal (Gyllenhaal), who owns a local bakery that surely must be cooperatively owned. But, as the narrating voice of author Karen Eiffel (Thompson) informs us, this particular audit is special. For one thing, Harold has fallen madly in love with Miss Pascal, an occurance that plays out amusingly on Ferrell's face as it is narrated. But the narrator also tells us something vague about how Harold's malfunctioning wristwatch foreshadows his imminent death. But since Harold hears the helpful narration, he should be able to escape his fate, right? Well, as Professor Hilbert (Hoffman) suggests, I suppose that depends on whether this is a comedy or a tragedy.
- When Stranger Than Fiction is at its best, it simply lets its talented cast fill out an entertaining and quirky set of characters in a series of mostly comic situations. After all, it is genuinely funny to watch Will Ferrell react to a formless voice describing his toothbrushing routine, and Dustin Hoffman is perfect as a barefooted, coffee-swilling professor. When the film is at its worst, however...well, there is a certain unjustified pretension in character names that may very well have been cribbed from the Wikipedia entry on "mathematics." Still, the film mercifully allows most of its underlying philosophy to remain sufficiently unobtrusive and thankfully restricts the CGI diagrams of Harold's daily routine to our first few encounters with him. As a result, most of what we see and hear in Stranger Than Fiction is far more enjoyable than anything Karen Eiffel could ever write.
