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Directed by Marc Forster, starring Will Ferrell, Maggie
Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, Emma Thompson
(113 mins, 12A)
Review by Philip French,The Observer
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Many people have the feeling that they're not entirely
free to act and are being manipulated by outside forces
(some call themselves Marxists, others are diagnosed as
schizophrenic). On the other hand, writers often find
that the characters they're creating take on a life of
their own and demand a say in their fictive fates.
These two notions come together in the fascinating Stranger
than Fiction, the new movie by Marc Forster, the American-based
German-Swiss director best known for Finding Neverland,
his picture about JM Barrie and the writing of Peter Pan
Stranger than Fiction belongs to a recent cycle of self-conscious
post-modern movies with a philosophical bent that explore
issues of creativity and identity in a playful, often
eccentric fashion. One thinks of Being John Malkovich,
Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,
but looking back to the 1960s there were several French
pictures exploring these themes: in Agnès Varda's
deeply serious Les Créatures, a novelist works
his neighbours in Brittany into a novel and then plays
a strange chess game with one of them for the fate of
the others; in Trans-Europ-Express, a self-mocking Alain
Robbe-Grillet plays a screenwriter conjuring up a script
on a train from Paris to Antwerp and its characters spring
to life around him.
The most obvious comparison, however, as Forster and his
screenwriter Zach Helm well know, is with Woody Allen's
Melinda and Melinda, which also stars Will Ferrell (in
what was his first straight role) and Maggie Gyllenhaal,
and poses the same question: 'Is life a comedy or a tragedy?'
Ferrell plays Harold Crick, a special agent for the Federal
Revenue Service, who constantly intrudes on other people's
lives while investigating tax evasion. He's a creature
of habit, punctilious and organised to a fault, his own
life uncluttered by emotions or attachments. Then he begins
to examine the financial affairs of a baker, Anna Pascal
(Maggie Gyllenhaal), a generous, free-spirited, anarchist
who refuses to pay taxes to fund things she morally disapproves
of... such as war.
Her life, manner and physical attractiveness upset him,
and love begins to raise its troublesome head. He's also
disturbed by a female voice that sounds as if it is commenting
upon his actions and thoughts. The voice speaks in a highly
literary, not to say authorial fashion, and a shrink thinks
he's schizophrenic. When Crick says that he feels as if
he's in a book, the therapist suggests, as if it were
the most natural thing in the world, that a literary theorist
like Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) might be
the best person to deal with his problems.
Crick is right. He is indeed a character in a book being
written by Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), a reclusive British
novelist of great intellectual distinction living in the
same American city and suffering from a writer's block.
As if it were standard practice, her publishers have engaged
Penny Escher (Queen Latifah), a specialist in helping
troubled authors complete their books. She moves into
Karen's apartment, as ordered and uncluttered as Crick's.
Karen is relentless in her confrontation with death, and
the working title of her work-in-progress, 'Death and
Taxes', comes from Benjamin Franklin's famous claim that
'in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes'.
Karen has taken this aphorism literally in making Harold
Crick a tax inspector. But having set this up, how can
she find an appropriate way to kill him off? With Penny's
assistance she contemplates everything from suicide to
crashing off a bridge into a river.
The movie's funniest scenes - and everyone plays dead
straight - concern the detective work of Professor Hilbert,
as by a process of deduction and elimination he seeks
to discover what kind of book Crick is in (a tragedy or
a comedy), and how this walking fiction might intervene
to control his own life or death. Appropriately enough,
Hilbert is not only an astute critic and literary historian,
he is also the appointed faculty lifeguard who sits at
the university's indoor swimming pool reading scholarly
works as he watches over the bathers. At one point on
a blackboard behind him we can read an analysis of Lawrence
Durrell's Alexandria Quartet dealing with the fates visited
on the principal characters, and Hilbert is ever ready
with a convincing literary allusion or example, most tellingly
with a quote from that high priest of ludic post-modernism,
Italo Calvino.
Eventually, and inevitably, Crick tracks down Karen Eiffel,
his God-playing creator, and several further questions
are interestingly raised, among them: 'Is life more important
than literature?' and 'What are the responsibilities of
writers to their creations and to their readers?' Not
until Karen has committed her final thoughts to paper
can Crick's fate be decided, and his intervention could
result in ruining a potential masterwork.
This consistently funny, intriguing and intellectually
engaging picture goes for chuckles and appreciative smiles
rather than belly laughs, and up until the final moments
it appeals to the mind rather than the heart. In the last
moments, however, it abandons the dichotomy between comedy
and tragedy and opts for affirmative whimsicality, finding
the wondrousness of life in a catalogue of small domestic
incidents and epiphanies.
It gets dangerously close here to Maria's 'Favourite Things'
in The Sound of Music. But that's a minor matter in a
witty, intelligent, well-acted picture that's also beautifully
designed and edited.
It is also worth noting - and this must be some kind of
a cinematic first - that the surnames of all the characters
are borrowed from celebrated thinkers associated with
mathematics from Blaise Pascal through David Hilbert to
MC Escher and Francis Crick. This goes way beyond Harold
Pinter naming the principal characters in No Man's Land
after early 20th-century cricketers.
Some thoughts from director Marc Forster and screenplay
writer Zach Helm.
What Forster immediately loved about "Strangers Than
Fiction" was that, in the midst of Harold Crick's unusual
and unlikely predicament, is a hilarious yet deeply moving
inquiry into how we shape our realities.
He says: "I saw Stranger Than Fiction as the story
of a man who's been asleep for most of his life and suddenly
wakes up and realizes he has very little time left and that
he has to do something we all would like to do in some way-change
our story. I thought it was a fantastic script, a very funny
comedy with heart and soul."
Forster elaborates: "I've always wanted to try something
comedic, but I also try to make films that are not just
entertaining, but also emotional and inspiring. I was fascinated
by Stranger Than Fiction, because I think we all have a
narrator in our lives. We all have inner voices in our heads
that tell us what to do and how to be. What Harold Crick
discovers in the midst of these incredible events is how
to escape all that and really begin to enjoy every second
of his existence."
What inspired the tale?
The inspiration for 'Stranger Than Fiction' began in 2001,
when the then 26-year-old writer Zach Helm flashed upon
the idea of a man who finds himself accompanied day and
night by a relentless narrator only he can hear. Helm brought
the idea to producer Lindsay Doran, with whom he was already
collaborating on another project, and as they talked about
the best direction for the story to take, Helm decided the
narrator should say that the man is about to die.
Recalls Zach Helm: I wanted to tell the story of a man who
found his life just before he lost it. There's something
very poetic in the understanding of one's place in the world
and the meaning of one's life, but it's far more dramatic
when such understanding occurs only days before that life
ends."
Kevin Crust, Los Angeles Times:
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A refreshingly grown-up comedy, "Stranger"
is a charming film that is unafraid to be low-key in ways
that studio releases seldom are. A large part of that
is due to the wilfully gentle performance of Ferrell,
who is always eminently more watchable when he plays sweet
and childlike - think "Elf" - than in his more
overbearing roles. Like many clowns, he is seldom more
interesting than when he wears the sad face. The film's
star-laden ensemble attacks the material with deadpan
glee, grounding its quirky characters in the reality of
the predicament at hand. Thompson's writer is a neurotic
jangle of nerves who spits in a tissue before snuffing
out her cigarettes but diligently researches the various
ways Harold might meet his maker. Hoffman is the meticulous
scholar whose secondary responsibilities include serving
as a faculty lifeguard (reading Sue Grafton from his perch
above the pool). Gyllenhaal makes civil disobedience seem
common-sensical (not to mention sexy)….
Clever throughout, "Stranger" will merit year-end
awards consideration, especially for writing and acting.
It manages to be smart and surprising and provides this
season of serious movies with a much-needed shot of whimsy.
As technology threatens to limit human contact, it's refreshing
to see a film in which the big questions are handled in
an entertaining and thoughtful manner that encourages
non-electronic interconnectivity. It may not answer any
big questions, but it makes considering them more fun.
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