As a writer, it’s easy sometimes to get caught up imagining the way my autobiography is one day going to be written. Or, sometimes I’m even so vain that I second-guess my decisions, considering the likely possibility that one day someone will probably want to write a biography about my life. And I wonder about how well some of my dumber decisions are going to play out on the page.
There’s even a letter or two I decided not to mail because I wasn’t willing to one day be remembered for those words.
Yikes! Honest eh? I’m exaggerating a bit, I hope, but the point I’m getting at is that Harold Crick, Will Ferrell’s character in Stranger than Fiction, gets the random, unexplained opportunity to hear someone else writing the story of his life as he lives it out.
This is a thoughtful, smart film that will let you glimpse a side of Ferrell’s acting ability you probably haven’t seen before, helped out by scene-stealers Maggie Gylenhall and Dustin Hoffman.
In the trailers, this film was sold as anything from a flat-out comedy to a dramedy and a dark fantasy. It’s a little of each, but doesn’t fit neatly into any of those genres, smoothly mixing laugh out loud with heartfelt tearjerker moments.
Crick is so boring and normal when the film begins he’s almost a cliché. He’s almost painful to watch, going about his structured IRS tax assessor’s life, counting stairs and tooth-brush strokes and measuring the minutes of the day with his faithful wristwatch.
But somehow he’s still lovable, and he becomes more so as the plot progresses, particularly when he starts hearing a woman’s voice narrating, or writing, his life, and the things she says in her literary-sounding English accent begin coming true with startling accuracy.
So Crick does what most people do when they start hearing voices. He goes to a shrink, but that doesn’t work and he eventually winds up in the office of Jules Hilbert, a literature professor played expertly by Dustin Hoffman. He steals every scene he’s in with little eccentricities like his passionate obsession with the line ‘Little did he know.’ -- “I once taught an entire university course based almost entirely on ‘little did he know,’” he tells Crick, thus beginning their quest to find the writer writing his life story, and, we eventually find out, planning his “imminent demise.”
Along the way Crick meets Ana Pascal, a cute, ornery, down-with-the-man tattooed bakery owner played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. She’s the Queen West to Crick’s Rosedale, but she’s kind and lovable and he’s sincere and earnest, and somewhere along the way, as Crick’s search for the essence of his like leads him down new paths, she decides “I think I might like you.”
The crux of this story though, the real battle, comes when Crick and Hilbert find the author who is writing his life story, and has just overcome writer’s block to pencil out an ending that, like all her other works, ends in tragedy.
And the story that is meant to end with Crick’s demise is a literary masterpiece that won’t be the same if he lives. The question is, will the ending be sacrificed, or will Crick pay the price for literary beauty?
You should go and find out.
