Review of Stranger Than Fiction (2006) by Andy B — 05 Nov 2013

(**1/2 ) I wanted to like Stranger than Fiction much more than I did, due to its many great parts, but it didn't have a good enough story to build all the greatness around. Don't get me wrong, the premise is amazing, but the end product is a little too generic and ineffective to make it a really good movie.

This is the story of the story of Harold Crick (Ferrell), a tax assessor who has a very mundane and organized life until it gets taken over by an author (Thompson) who starts narrating all the details. He starts hearing her voice one day and thinks he's going crazy, so he enlists the help of a local literary professor (Hoffman) to help him figure out where she's going with his life and what he can do to make sure she doesn't kill him off. Whether or not the professor believes his story, he is so intrigued by the turn it's taking that he starts analyzing what Crick knows to figure out what kind of story it is. Meanwhile the author is suffering from writer's block and trying to figure out how to end the story, and Crick finally decides he has to confront her and try to sway her opinion.

This might be the best performance I've seen by Will Ferrell outside of his best comedies. Sometimes comedic acting gets over-looked for its quality. Personally I think either Anchorman or Old School featured Ferrell's best work, but this dramatic turn for him showed some great potential as a serious emotional actor. Dustin Hoffman stole the show, however, and played an awesome character who had some real emotional struggles while keeping a matter-of-fact perspective on the whole thing. Thompson wasn't half bad either as the neurotic chain-smoking writer who perhaps faces the toughest choices of anyone in the film.

The only reason I didn't like this film as much as some do is because for all its original meta-humor about storytelling, it came down to a fairly generic conclusion. Without giving anything away, Hoffman's first analysis of her ending is a little too praising in my opinion, but his second one is spot-on. Also, Gyllenhaal's character is a bit over-the-top and is swayed toward Harold in an unbelievable and rapid fashion which kind of annoyed me. The writer of Crick's story couldn't quite figure out how to end her movie. Neither could the writer of this script.