Ferrell breaks the mold in this pleasantly surprising, terrific film.
Will Ferrell is Harold Crick, a man who, simply stated, is not living his life to the fullest. As an IRS agent, Crick’s daily life has become a repetitive and mundane routine. He’s fine with this because he just doesn’t know anything else. A famous novelist and legendary recluse named Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) is writing a novel about just such a man. The exact same man, in fact. One day Crick starts hearing Eiffel’s narration in his head. Although he has no idea what’s going on, he realizes some of her points about his life are actually very accurate. Seeking the help of literary theorist Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), Crick tries to figure out why this is happening to him. He has concurrently fallen for a cute anarchist baker named Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal), whom he is supposed to be investigating for underpaying on her taxes. Crick’s life is about to undergo some radical changes as Eiffel nears a potentially grim end to her greatest work.
Stranger Than Fiction is directed by Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland) from a script by Zach Helm. Queen Latifah co-stars.
This is a startling movie with an impressive depth I never expected. The performances are outstanding across the board. The script is excellent. Will Ferrell gives the best performance of his career. Am I overstating a bit? No, no I’m not. This is a great movie and I loved it.
There have been a lot of these kinds of movies over the years. Stories about sad characters that must undergo a series of life-changing events to fix their hum drum existence. A few have been gems (American Beauty, The Truman Show) and more than a few others have been well, less so (Elizabethtown, Shallow Hal). Stranger Than Fiction takes the very clever concept of a man realizing he’s a character within a novel and, instead of resting on the laurels of the great idea alone, jumps off towards a truly touching, often deep journey through a man’s self-discovery. Walking away from Fiction, I found myself thinking about what I’d just seen for the rest of the day. I was in a rather pensive mood, in fact. As a sometimes admittedly jaded critic, that doesn’t happen to me often enough these days.
Although this is probably his most dramatic work to date, Ferrell doesn’t leave the comedy behind. His knack for straight man humor is present in spades, a comic opposite to his Ricky Bobby character earlier this year. Ferrell pulls a true humanity out of the role, making Crick sympathetic and connecting to Helm’s script as I think few actors could have. His work is the best I’ve seen so far this year.
Helm’s script briskly moves through a two hour-plus story with the help of Forster’s adept direction. I know writers are seldom happy with the end result of their vision on screen, but it seems as if writer and director saw pretty eye-to-eye on this one. The final result is smart enough to intersperse the light-heartedness in such a way as to never distill the drama of the piece. At the same time, it never takes itself so seriously as to become depressing. It’s a delicate and rarely achieved balanced that is so fully realized in Stranger Than Fiction.
Dustin Hoffman’s amusingly named Jules Hilbert adds another layer of depth to Fiction. He plays the eccentric book lover so well to Ferrell’s straight man, resulting in a perfect chemistry that makes for some of the film’s most amusing and memorable moments. Maggie Gyllenhaal is as appealing as she has been since, well… Ever. I wouldn’t have put her with Ferrell in a million years, but they really do work. Thompson is perfectly cast as the embittered novelist with a decade-long bout of writer’s block. She smokes her cigarette’s and imagines tragedy with such perfectly suited intensity. Again, the paring of Latifah and Thompson isn’t one I saw coming, but they play off each other to the utmost strengths perfectly.
Stranger Than Fiction is one of those movies where I first saw the trailer, laughed, and expected disappointment. It’s got a good trailer and a great concept, two elements that rarely lead to a strong result when viewing the finished product. Instead, Fiction is a pleasant surprise. It’s a terrific movie that should appeal to just about anyone.
ReelzChannel Rating: 
What's on the Disc
Sadly, this is a pretty skimpy collection of extras for one of 2006's best and most underappreciated movies.
A collection of Featurettes goes through the making of the movie, from locations to casting, visual effects, scripts and so on. Luckily, these go a little deeper than the standard EPK, but they are still kept on a fairly superficial levels. The featurettes here are Actors in Search of a Story, Buidling the Team, On Location in Chicago, Words on a Page and On the Set.
The most informative of these featurettes is entitled Picture a Number: The Evolution of a G.U.I. (Graphic User Interface). This goes into the visual work employed on Stranger Than Fiction to create those numeric graphic in order to effectively convey the anal, numeric obsessions of Harold Crick. It's a different use of computer effects and works well to help create the world of this character.
The other extra is two rather pointless deleted scenes. They are two expanded segments from the Book TV show that Karen Eiffel is interviewed on by Kristin Chenoweth's character. The first is the full interview with Eiffel and the second is a segment that didn't make it into the movie where one of the visual effects guys poses as an author on the show. Chenoweth is amusing as a dimwitted host who has no idea what she's talking about, but the scenes don't add much of anything to the movie.
Too bad some better deleted scenes or maybe outtakes or even a commentary couldn't have been included. This is a pretty paltry collection of extras for such a great movie.