Character Assassination

IRS auditor Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) hears a voice in his head — and discovers it plans his demise — in the Marc Forster film Stranger Than Fiction. (Columbia Pictures)

Will Ferrell has finally made a movie in which he doesn’t remove his shirt and run through the streets in tighty whities. In Hollywood, this is progress. With Stranger Than Fiction, Ferrell has found a film that doesn’t depend on his extraordinary lack of self-consciousness but rather his extraordinary ordinariness: those tiny eyes and lips, that scratchy bad curly hair, the face that is best described as “not-ugly-but ...” Quietly, Ferrell plays Harold Crick, an IRS auditor Everyman who awakes one morning to a woman’s voice in his head narrating his life. As dictated — with “a British accent and a better vocabulary” — his life doesn’t sound too good. Crick, according to the narrator, is a drone, a man whose closest relationship is to his watch, although he also feels affection for integers. Here is a Ferrell character that lacks self-consciousness because there is no self, just an unnoted series of errands and tasks, one foot in front of the other.

Director Marc Forster (Finding Neverland) puts Harold in an external world that matches his internal lack of specificity. His apartment’s grey walls are devoid of art and the vegetables on his plate look like freeze-dried astronaut food; these are the details that the narrator hasn’t sketched in, one presumes. But also, this aggressively meaningful, super-stylized set dressing — sleek explanatory graphics float across the screen à la the Ikea scene in Fight Club, lawyers take note — places Stranger Than Fiction in the quirky queue with movies by Michel Gondry (The Science of Sleep) and, most obviously, the Charlie Kaufman-Spike Jonze film Adaptation, also a riff on the mercenary tendencies of artists. Still, while Stranger Than Fiction shares story and look with Adaptation, Forster’s movie never matches Kaufman’s polyphonic thrill.

Crick is surrounded by colourful characters, making him appear all the more beige. An academic (Dustin Hoffman) who he approaches with his problem is also the “faculty lifeguard” — a nice idea — so the pair converse poolside to determine whether Harold is living out a tragedy or a comedy, and any scene with kickboards and literary theory is funny. Harold may, in fact, be at the centre of a romance novel, as he becomes drawn to Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal), an angry anarchist baker whom he’s auditing. Gyllenhaal is as alert and smoky-sexy as ever, pounding her dough like she wishes it was George W. Bush’s head and surprising herself with slow-build affection for this straight-edge tax man. Harold isn’t a buffoon, but he is as shut down as Chernobyl; his own desires have been shelved so long he’s forgotten what they are. Ana bakes him hot cookies, which he eats slowly at first, then in great gulps as if to remind himself — as new love can remind anyone — that he is flesh, that he exists. Of course, he may not, but when Harold is on Ana’s couch, eyes closed, serenading her with an a cappella version of the pop-punk song Whole Wide World, the two alight. It’s the film’s best, most relaxed scene, and the least showy, though it still backs the thesis: We all need to be the central character in somebody’s story, or we might as well die.

Novelist Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) and Penny Escher (Queen Latifah) contemplate killing off a character in Eiffel's book. (Columbia Pictures)

The narrator who is either provoking Harold’s slow transformation into a fully realized human being, or simply recording it, is Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), a greasy, unkempt, world-famous author anguishing over how to kill off her protagonist. Harold hears (literally) that his death is pre-destined, and the film/book becomes a thriller on a stopwatch: The character must find the author and stop her from killing him. Eiffel can only complete her masterpiece if she murders Crick on paper, but Crick suddenly wants to live. Will she kill him? Well, what would artists like Anne Sexton, Picasso and Hemingway — all selfish geniuses — have done? The recent, unfairly dismissed film Running With Scissors, based on the memoir by Augusten Burroughs, has Annette Bening in a tour de force as Burroughs’s mother, a failed poet who sacrifices her son, her marriage and her sanity to feed her muse. Like Stranger, Scissors plays the artist’s narcissism for laughs, but also knows there’s grave danger in it.

In the shiny, inoffensive Stranger Than Fiction, no one and nothing really feels at risk. Even the random acts that make Harold more determined to live — a giant digger bites a hunk out of his apartment — are predictably offbeat, cute even. Pleasant, tight and funny enough, Stranger feels as safe as Harold Crick himself. Where is the terror? Really, some terror would have made this comedy much funnier. The idea that one’s identity is constructed elsewhere, erasing free will, is a fundamental, primal fear: believing an outside force is dictating your life (and death) is the difference between madness and sanity. Dipping into the darkness that’s waiting in the premise would have lent some extra pages to this slim volume, turning it from the film equivalent of an enjoyable novella into a fleshy, un-put-downable book.

Stranger Than Fiction opens Nov. 10.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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