Stranger Than Fiction reviews

[Sabin]

I'm between Daniel and Magilla on this one.

In truth, nothing interesting is done or said with this premise on any level. It says nothing about life, love, anything, and remains accurately pinpointed as a piece of Kaufman-lite. If the first 50 don't hook you, Lord knows the rest won't. The film is content to slog to the inevitable finish line under the guise of self-satisfied faux-literary masturbation and smirky hand-job fatalism. The problem with the central conceit is that at no point does anybody ask what can be done to further the narrative. Zach Helm is entirely too proud of his premise to really do anything with it. This is the movie that deserved the funky meta-twists of 'Adaptation' (which I look back on, and more and more I realize is not a great film, although far more entertaining). By the end of 'Stranger than Fiction' I was eager to leave and couldn't help but think of more and more Syd Field factoids to toss in there to spice things up. Disappointing...

...but on the other hand (and there is one), it's really not that bad. The score is delightful and the movie is full of lovely character details that I enjoyed, like why Dustin Hoffman's character was always eating yogurt. I'm really quite surprised that Emma Thompson's performance didn't at least garner her a Golden Globe nomination. It's quite good and the scene where she first sees Ferrell is improbably moving. She's better than the film, and my God so is Lá Maggie, who breathes life into this clichéd role almost to a fault. She's completely unbelievable as anybody who would be caught dead with this walking nothing (je t'aime! je t'aime!). Her brilliance is detrimental.

I think Marc Forster is one of the most painfully literal-minded directors on the planet, and at the very least 'Stranger than Fiction' is five steps ahead of 'Monster's Ball' and 'Finding Neverland' (the latter of which I recently rewatched and am mystified that the DGA nominated that bastard dulleness over Michel Gondry) combined. His touch here isn't bad; rather, he's let down by his source material. All things considered though, I enjoyed the film despite its missteps.

[Big Magilla]

You guys are too harsh. The film's no masterpiece, but as 2006 comedies go, it was one of the better ones. As to the two earlier films it's compared to, it's gentler than Adaptation and less obvious than The Truman Show.

The acting from a tone downed Will Ferrell, a droll Dustin Hoffman and a manic Emma Thompson is quite good, though I would agree Queen Latifah is wasted.

I couldn't actually stand Will Ferrell until Talladega Nights, which I found surprisingly ingratiating. I also liked Sacha Cohen Baron better in that than that inexplicably popular piece of 2006 trash he's better known for, but I digress.

[The Original BJ]

I have no opinion about this movie. When I saw it last fall, I watched, time went by, I chuckled a few times, then I left the theater. This film is totally pointless and yet I feel no anger toward it whatsoever.

I would like to know, however, how anyone expects us to believe Karen Eiffel is any kind of great writer (at least for anyone above a fifth-grade reading level.)

Or how the film could have gone absolutely NOWHERE with its conceit in the third act.

Or what Queen Latifah's character is even doing in this movie.

Still, as light-weight '06 comedies go, it's miles better than the yellow van.

[dws1982]

I hated every minute of this. Or actually, I didn't...I only hated the first fifty minutes of it. Then I pushed the stop button on my DVD player and put Homicide: Life On The Street season 3, disc six back in.

It was right at the moment where Maggie Gyllenhaal's character said something about how, if she couldn't make the world a better place through the law, she'd do it through cookies. At that point I decided that life is too short to be wasted on such complete and total bullshit.

[Sonic Youth]

Not much to discuss here. The word "middle-brow" was practically invented for it. What could have been a smashing 30 minute short is much too long at 1hr 50min. because it doesn't stretch itself beyond its premise. It's not much of a comedy because it doesn't take advantage of all the comedic possibilities. It's not much of a drama because the main character is too buttoned up to radiate any poignancy. It's not much of anything except a moderatey engaging, cerebral diversion.

But it's worth mentioning for Will Ferrell, who demonstrates that an Oscar nom might be in his future. Not that he's great here. Just like with Jim Carrey, there's a real sense of strain in his efforts to tamp down his zaniness, and the movie would probably have benefitted from starring a regular actor who knows how to emit an inner life beneath the mask-like facade. But he clearly has potential, he has the willingness and the ability to branch out, and I can see a good director getting a great performance out of him. Could Will Ferrell be... the next Dan Aykroyd?

[flipp525]

STRANGER THAN FICTION

cast: Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Dustin Hoffman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Queen Latifah; dir. Marc Forster

A hybrid of The Truman Show and Adaptation, this film tries to succeed as a comedy-drama despite some of its weaker elements. Will Ferrell is Harold Crick -- the protagonist in his own (boring) life and Karen Eiffel’s long-awaited new novel “Death and Taxes” which, by its own title, implies that, like Willie Loman, her downtrodden everyman will die, too. When Harold starts to hear Eiffel’s narration of his life (her book) and references to his impending demise, he starts to take action to steer the course of his own rapidly diminishing story.

This film, of course, begs certain questions: Is Harold steering his own story or is Karen? At what point, has the protagonist become the architect of his own life? Why hasn’t Karen published a novel in over ten years? Why does Harold have such a boring life? And why does Will Ferrell have such brillo-y hair?

Will Ferrell does a fair job as the bland protagonist but the movie really belongs to (and is saved by) its supporting characters. Maggie Gyllenhaal infuses her free-spirited law-student-cum-baking-entrepreneur with such energy that you can almost see how she might give someone so utterly grounded a chance. Dustin Hoffman is sharp, witty, and hilarious especially during his Q&A with Harold in which he's trying to find out what kind of novel Harold’s stuck in. However, it's Emma Thompson who steals the movie as the neurotic, chain-smoking writer suffering a block and desperately in search of an appropriate death for her character. The scene where she realizes that her words have come to life alone is worth an Oscar nomination (agreed, Sabin). Given more time, her character’s backstory would’ve been the one I’d most like to see explored further.

*** 1/2 out of 5.

As a sidenote, I found this movie particularly interesting since last year at this time, the short story editor at “Playboy” insisted that I “kill off” the main character of a story I’d submitted to them before they would publish it. I thought long and hard about it and finally decided that I just couldn’t do it to the character so I kept my ending, thus saving his life and have been shopping the story around to another publication ever since. Ah, to be a young and stubborn artist!

[Sabin]

The title is misleading. It's more like "Docile In Relation to Fiction". The film's third act is a self-involved slog, with admittedly one inspired scene where Crick actually meets His Maker (that scene's success is largely derived from Emma Thompson, who is wonderful throughout but deserves an Oscar nomination for that scene alone) but afterwards...what is it saying that I don't already know? The moralizing deflates not just the comedy but the outlandish premise. Taking an abstract premise seriously is fine, but not when it forgets to earn it. Especially when it seems like there's an even more brilliant twist around the corner: Depressive Author & Character Aware that His Death is Imminent...what could happen to genuinely toss the movie on its head into an inspired third act? What could possibly...happen...to...

OH YEAH! KILL THE AUTHOR! Kill the author. Not only does this give license to a final act that throttles forward as Harold Crick is being ghost-written, but it gives license for Will Ferrell to come alive and act genuinely panicked. His inspired moments occur early on in the film, and afterwards embodies the worst of Jim Carrey. The guy is an inexpressive chalkboard of a performer, and his relationship with Maggie Gyllenhaal while certainly mandated by the script and acceptable, is wholly unconvincing and unpleasant to see. I'm going to attempt to keep my love affair with La Maggie on hold when I say that Maggie Gyllenhaal is so good that she almost cripples the film by turning Anna Pascal into the person who might just fall in love with Harold Crick and save his life, rather than "the person who might just fall in love with Harold Crick and save his life".

And yet, I take the movie as pleasure-viewing, a kind of 'Bartleby'-by-way-of-The New Yorker. A jamming score, beautiful Chicago locale, Emma Thompson's hilarious performance, Maggie's arm tattoo, Dustin Hoffman's bent professor tossing inane pretensions like "It's been a very revealing ten seconds" and "Let's start with ridiculous and work backwards". And of course the heavenly promise of laying in a hero's bed as La Maggie feeds me Bavarian Creams. I MEAN HAROLD! Harold. Right. Yeah. Good for Harold.

Will Ferrell has weird teeth.



Edited By Sabin on 1164473548

[OscarGuy]

Fun little movie. The first time I've actually been able to stand Will Farell. Not the best comedy ever made, but it is definitely entertaining...though I really wish it had been a tragedy instead of a comedy.

[Sonic Youth]

Two reviews:


Stranger Than Fiction

By TODD MCCARTHY
Variety


The oft-examined intersections of reality and fantasy get a thorough workout in "Stranger Than Fiction." Bound to be compared to the work of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who has set the standard for this sort of intricate cinematic mischief over the past several years, this first comedy from the unpredictable, hot-and-cold director Marc Forster sometimes becomes too self-consciously clever, and it doesn't entirely resolve its own central dilemma. But it remains inventive and funny to the end, features fine performances from Will Ferrell and especially Emma Thompson, and offers enough to enjoy and dispute to make it a good B.O. attraction with long-distance potential for smart-skewing audiences.

It will be a revealing test of Ferrell's fan base to see how many of those who thronged to "Talladega Nights" will follow him into the moderately more rarefied territory of "Stranger Than Fiction," which is brainier stuff but far from inaccessible. Non-fans of Ferrell and the most ardent Kaufman devotees likely will find this film too cutesy.

Accompanied by a stream of narration by a British female voice and an assortment of diagrams criss-crossing the screen, Harold Crick (Ferrell) is introduced as a sorry specimen of human life. A senior agent for the Internal Revenue Service in Chicago, he's a virtual automaton; the man rigidly follows the same routine every day, has no friends, enjoys no vacations. A virtual parody of the company man, he doesn't seem quite real.

There's a good reason for this, however, as Harold is a fictional creation, the central character in a new book by celebrated reclusive author Kay Eiffel (Thompson). It is she who is telling Harold's story, but something goes awry when he begins hearing her voice in his head.

"I'm a character in my own life," he tells a shrink (Linda Hunt), who can only imagine he's schizo but recommends him to literature professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), who can't initially figure out who's "writing" Harold but recommends he start living the life he's always wanted. And so he does, as he takes up the guitar and puts the make on free-spirited baker Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal), whom he was recently assigned to audit.First-time screenwriter Zach Helm has an evident gift for invention, and the story fully engages when its ideas are pushed to their limits, forcing the major elements to collide.Kay has been suffering from intense writer's block, to the point where, in an enterprising move, her publisher has installed a sort of enforcer (Queen Latifah) in her loft to make sure she doesn't procrastinate.

Chain-smoking and fulminating about her creative state, Thompson pumps Kay up into a neurotic wonder of a character, quite likable for all her obsessive nuttiness.

Through a fluke, Harold discovers who his creator is and she naturally flips out when he tracks her down. Many complications ensue, the main one, as the professor helpfully points out, being that Kay's novels are always tragic. "You have to die," Jules warns, stressing that to do otherwise would harm a brilliant literary achievement.Stories constructed in this fashion inevitably box themselves into a corner, and it takes great creative dexterity to satisfactorily resolve them. Strong questions hover over the way Helm sorts things out here; some will feel cheated, others will accept it, but either way the upshot does provide something to chew on afterward.

Although the film's aesthetic is distinctly different, it's not surprising to learn one of Forster's key inspirations for the film was Jacques Tati's 1967 visionary comedy about modern urban life, "Playtime." Without constructing a stylized, artificial world, the director, cinematographer Roberto Schaefer and production designer Kevin Thompson create a subtly claustrophobic sense of boxed-in characters by the way they employ sets and existing buildings. Entire pic was lensed in Chicago, and the city has rarely been used more inventively.

In line with this, Ferrell's performance is highly focused. At first one fears the worst, that he'll be forced to play a one-dimensional, robot-like character throughout. But once he absorbs his predicament, he flexes his humanity without going goofy, resulting in a winning portrayal.

In his exuberant new phase as a character actor, Hoffman continues to be a major boon to any film he's in; his timing has never been better, and his interchange with other actors is superb. The girlfriend strand of the storyline with Gyllenhaal, while pleasant enough, pales a bit compared with the rest.

Pic looks and sounds first-class, and the soundtrack full of pop tunes is unusually arresting.


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Stranger Than Fiction


By John Defore
Hollywood Reporter

TORONTO -- Hearing the premise, you'd guess "Stranger Than Fiction" is Marc Forster's entry into the Charlie Kaufman meta-movie arena: One day, Harold Crick discovers that he is the creation of a novelist; rebelling against the idea of a predetermined destiny, he sets out to find his creator and beg her to set him free instead of killing him off.

Surely, you imagine, it won't be long before Crick and his neighbors start to suspect an even larger fiction, addressing the filmmakers directly and turning the whole thing into a comic Mobius filmstrip.

In practice, "Fiction" isn't nearly that unusual. Less like "Adaptation" than a smarter version of "Click," the picture pleases while remaining unchallenging to a broad audience. Boxoffice prospects are particularly good given star Will Ferrell's recent success, though his performance here is hardly a Ricky Bobby-like yukfest.

His performance isn't shtick at all, in fact. Like "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," this is a film that seems tailored to a comedian's weirder side but instead offers sweetness and sincerity. Ferrell is deliberately, almost distractingly normal as a by-the-numbers IRS auditor who sees his orderly world come apart. (Kay Eiffel, the author who invented him, is supposed to be a heavy hitter, but she lifted Crick straight out of central casting -- the only innovation being his R2D2-like wristwatch, which with beeps and blinks tries in vain to wake Crick from his robotic existence.)


Ferrell's straightman act isn't ironic, either. Treating it that way would have earned some easy laughs early on, but it would have sabotaged the film's aim to move quickly away from its broadest material into light romance. "Fiction" doesn't entirely succeed in that department -- love interest Maggie Gyllenhaal, as a baker being audited by Crick, is especially sexy here, but the two don't make much sense as a couple -- though it comes close.....


....If the movie doesn't make the most of its self-aware conceit, it fills in the gaps with small, lovely touches that would work in any normal romance: Shy banter on an extended bus, with Ferrell sitting in the hinge section while Gyllenhaal, a row away, is moved to and fro when the bus turns corners; the tightly wound accountant being introduced to the joy of milk and cookies; the warm glow of multicolored light fixtures that break the ice on the couple's first date. "Fiction" may disappoint viewers at the extremes -- those hoping for wild experimentation or for another wacky Ferrell comedy -- but it's awfully satisfying on its own terms.

[Big Magilla]

Per Jeffrey Wells:

As a would-be Oscar contender, Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia, 11.10) is dead. This fact was made resoundingly clear after today's (9. press screening at the Toronto Film Festival. You and your friends can still pay to see it when it opens two months from now and chuckle and eat popcorn and discuss it afterwards... knock yourselves out. But forget the derby.

[Mister Tee]

I know Damien, for one, can't wait for the new Marc Forster movie.

Screen Daily

Stranger Than Fiction

Mike Goodridge in Toronto 10 September 2006

Dir: Marc Forster. US. 2006. 118mins.
A highly original script by newcomer Zach Helm, some superlative performances and the deft guiding hand of director Marc Forster, trying his hand at comedy for the first time, make Stranger Than Fiction the season's must-see film for discerning audiences. Financed and co-produced by Mandate Pictures, the film is having its world premiere at Toronto where feverishly strong word-of-mouth will begin its work in advance of its US release through Sony on Nov 10.

Helm's script is of the Charlie Kaufman school of wild imagination and it bears no little resemblance to Kaufman's Adaptation, which took $22.5m in North America in 2002/3. This script, also about the writing process, is more breezy than Kaufman -- and it doesn't have the edge or darkness that make Kaufman's voice inimitable. In accessibility terms, however, Helm's is a much cleaner, neater package and it will tickle a larger theatrical audience than Adaptation, especially since it boasts Will Ferrell in the lead role. It also bears thematic similarities to The Truman Show, but is too sophisticated to rival that 1998 film's broad demographic appeal ($125m domestic gross, $122m international), even with Ferrell.

Set in sunny present day Chicago, Stranger Than Fiction follows a dull, solitary tax agent called Harold Crick whose daily routine is controlled and timed precisely to the minute. We hear a female voice narrating his morning schedule and his trip to work, his arrival at work, his day and his solitary evening.

The following day, however, as he embarks on the same procedure as the day before, he too can suddenly hear the woman's voice correctly predicting what he will do and, worst of all, announcing that his death is imminent.

The woman's voice is that of Karen Eiffel (Thompson), a depressive novelist with writer's block struggling to find an appropriate way to kill Crick whom she believes is just a character in her latest book. Eiffel's publisher is putting pressure on her to finish the novel which is past its deadline and has dispatched a pushy assistant (Queen Latifah) to help Eiffel finish Crick off.

Crick quickly discovers that only he can hear the voice and is distracted as he goes out to audit a free-spirited baker called Ana (Gyllenhaal), listening as the voice tells him how much attracted he is to her. Desperate to avoid his death, he sets about discovering who is narrating his life, going to the local university to seek help from a literary theorist called Jules Hilibert (Hoffman) who suggests that he turn his story from a tragedy to a comedy and embark on a love story with Ana.

As he starts to enjoy his life and taste love for the first time, Harold determines to thwart the narrator and his quest for survival ultimately leads him to Eiffel (Thompson), who has just come up with the ideal way to kill him. Fortunately for Crick, she has not yet typed up her thoughts, but when both Hilibert and Crick read her notes, they realise that Eiffel's book is a masterpiece and has to end with Crick's death. It is up to Eiffel to decide whether Crick's life is worth snuffing out for the sake of a great piece of literature.

Leaving behind the intense drama of Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland and Stay, Forster applies a lightness of touch and sweetly optimistic tone to the quirky material. His ensemble is nothing short of perfect: Ferrell is restrained and appealing as Crick, Gyllenhaal a delight as the spunky Ana and veterans Thompson and Hoffman add both humour and soul to the proceedings. Thompson, in particular, brings a gravitas to the film's ending which brings tears to the eyes.

If the film is too light a soufflé to win awards in best picture or director categories, its screenplay and performances -- perhaps Ferrell and Thompson -- could certainly qualify, and many voters will appreciate how cleverly the film sustains its conceit from beginning to end. Like the best soufflés, the blend of ingredients here rises well once cooked.