A Movie in a Glass Box: Stranger Than Fiction

The place is like a museum. It's very beautiful and very cold, and you're not allowed to touch anything.
-Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction arrives with fanfare thanks in large part to young screenwriter Zach Helm (below), subject of a laudatory Vanity Fair profile earlier this year. The article described Helm as determined to forgo the usual screenwriter's life of struggling for credits and doing studio assigned rewrite work in favor of more personal projects such as Fiction and his directorial debut, next year's Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium.



Taking Helm at his word, if Fiction is a personal project than I'd say this young writer has spent far too long in graduate school seminar rooms. Despite lively performances from an unusually strong cast, Stranger Than Fiction left me cold.

The particulars: Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is an IRS agent living a ridiculously bland life. One day he begins to hear a female voice in his head as he brushes his teeth. The voice isn't speaking to him but rather describing his most mundane actions with a sense of bemused foreboding.
Harold's humdrum existence is disrupted to the point that he begins romancing a baker he's supposed to be auditing (sweetly played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) and fulfills a long-held dream of learning the guitar.

The voice belongs to Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), a creatively blocked novelist famous for killing her protagonists. Harold is (unknown to Karen) the main character in her work-in-progress, and she can't figure out a way to kill him. Once Harold hears the voice warn of his approaching death, he becomes determined to find the source of the narration. With the help of a literature professor (Dustin Hoffman), he begins to unravel the mystery of where "his novel" is headed.

In the climactic scenes of Stranger Than Fiction, Harold must decide whether or not to live out Karen's ending (and willingly participate in his own death) because after reading the book he decides it's "lovely" and "poetic." This point is where things began to break down for me. I searched Barlett's in vain for a quote about the role of fiction in our lives, but I'll have to do it myself.



In novels (and plays, and films), characters' choices fulfill a symbolic or metaphorical purpose. It feels like stating the obvious, but people live and die in real life for a billion and one reasons. I don't know if Zach Helm has read The Darwin Awards, but a high percentage of those reasons are fairly arbitary and meaningless when taken out of context.

I have no quarrel with the acting or filmmaking, but Stranger Than Fiction makes the youthful and romantic mistake of overestimating Art's role in our lives. The death "written" for Harold and the set of mischances (including the setting of a wristwatch to the wrong time)than lead up to it, are so unlikely as to render the end of Eiffel's book-within-a-movie a cruel joke about the importance of human existence. Who wants to watch a movie about that?