Will Ferrell is a boring guy.
Yes, he can be funny. But just look at him – he doesn’t look like a funny guy. He doesn’t look wacky, or even particularly amusing. He has a sort of Bill Murray quality – we know he’s funny because we’ve seen him do funny stuff, but otherwise one might assume him to be a regular, boring guy.
Accordingly, casting him as an IRS auditor who leads a mundane existence, even for an IRS auditor (his fianceé left him for an actuary), seems like a perfectly sensible idea. I’ve always found Ferrell to be at his funniest when dealing in low-key humour – his George W. impersonation is far superior to that horrible cheerleader or the Roxbury clubber – again, not unlike Bill Murray, particularly when directed by someone like Wes Anderson.
Stranger Than Fiction is effectively two movies, or one movie that was rewritten dramatically after the writer realized the original story wasn’t that interesting. Ferrell plays IRS auditor Harold Crick, whose life is uneventful until he meets a beautiful baker with a social conscience played by Maggie Gyllenhall. He falls in love with her carefree ways and sweet baked goods, and changes his life for the better so he can be with her.
This, obviously, is the part that wasn’t all that interesting. Ferrell is fun, and Gyllenhall is charming and adorable, but that alone makes for a fun if generic feel-good romantic comedy. No, the enticing part of Stranger than Fiction is that at about the same time he falls in love, Harold also begins to hear someone narrating his life. That narration comes courtesy of Emma Thompson, playing a chain-smoking, stressed-out novelist who hasn’t published a book in ten years and is in turn stressing out her publisher, who wants her new book sooner rather than later.
The narration is disconcerting enough as it describes Harold brushing his teeth, but it becomes another matter entirely when it mentions his imminent death. Harold realizes he must find out what’s going on with his life before it’s over.
The key to Stranger Than Fiction is Harold’s reformation from a dull and predictable nobody to a guy who lives life to the fullest, whether it’s putting the moves on a pretty baker or learning how to play the guitar. The delightful Gyllenhall is a big part, but even bigger is the unwanted narration: One’s life seems so much more meaningless when there’s a nearly omniscient narrator telling you all about it.
The film hinges on Ferrell’s portrayal of a man changing his entire life, and for the most part it succeeds. He’s by no means a great dramatic actor, but the role of “boring guy who’s confused by stuff” plays to his strength; like Adam Sandler in Punchdrunk Love, Ferrell’s natural strengths are channelled to create an effecitve character. He doesn’t quite come through in the serious moments, but everything up to that point is done so well that one doesn’t really mind.
It certainly doesn’t help that Ferrell is surrounded by some very good actors: Gyllenhall is very good, even if she’s playing the stereotypical “free spirit” that seduces the buckled-down working guy. Dustin Hoffman clearly has some fun playing an English professor (and occasional lifeguard) Harold enlists to help figure out what’s going on. His calm and bemusement in the face of Harold’s crisis (“Aren’t you glad to know you’re not a golem?”) is entertaining, and he can still bring the dramatic chops when his ultimate role in the film is revealed.
The real star of the film, in admittedly much less screen time than Ferrell, is Thompson, who’s both wacky and genuinely distraught as the blocked writer. She’s already stressed out over not being able to write, concocting suicide fantasies as a way of deciding how to kill off poor Harold. (“If you haven’t thought about throwing yourself off a building, how to do you expect to help me write a novel?” she asks her publisher-assigned helper, portrayed by Queen Latifah but really only there for expository purposes) Thompson is all nerves and eccentricity, but never treading entirely into caricature.
Stranger Than Fiction owes a great debt to the films of Charlie Kaufman. Even if screenwriter Zach Helm wasn’t directly inspired by Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, this film probably wouldn’t have gotten made 10 years ago. Thankfully, it’s more like Kaufman’s later films than his earlier, and it maintains a strong emotional core despite its lofty and intellectual concepts. The film lives and breathes with Ferrel’s reformation and Thompson’s career and life-altering decisions, and Helm never gets so caught up in admiring his intellect that he forgets to make the audience care about the characters.
Prior to the film, we saw a trailer for The Pursuit of Happyness, an upcoming film that casts Will Smith as a single, down-on-his-luck father trying to turn his life around. Trailers can always be deceiving, but this one was so desperately trying to sell “Feel Good Story!” that you could practically see subtitles asking us to love the character and assuring us it would all turn out well. It offered a seemingly obvious plot, rags-to-riches, and an almost rock-solid guarantee of a happy ending. People obviously want their happy endings, but this just seemed too much.
On the other hand, Stranger Than Fiction actually does offer an inspiring story of a man who sets out to change his life, yet without promising the audience a happy ending. Emma Thompson tells us Harold is going to die, and its only in the closing minutes of the film that we find out whether her narration is going to come true or not. Harold Crick is a sympathetic and fairly believable character, and we want him get the girl and live happily ever after. But Stranger Than Fiction succeeds because his future is never assured, either romantically or at all.
Speaking of trailers, the ads undersell Stranger Than Fiction quite a bit, playing it up as more of a Will Ferrell comedy. While it is funny, it’s also quite intelligent, emotional, and dramatic. It’s not the sort of film one can adequately sum up in a 30-second trailer, nor is it entirely Ferrell’s film: He owes a lot to Helm’s script, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Thompson pick up an Oscar nomination for her role. It’s a very good film that happens to be funny and make good use of a big star, but it has quite a bit to offer to just about anyone.