Not so strange, after all
Movies
Given its origins in chemistry and mechanism, and the illusory
magic of its moving images, the cinema not only encourages but virtually
demands experimentation with form and content. Despite the relative crudeness
of their equipment, its earliest practitioners in fact played with such tricks
as slow and fast motion, freeze frames, trick shots, various violations of the
laws of physics — in short, much of the magic that we now lump under the term
“special effects.” For almost as long a time, experiments in narrative
accompany the technical wizardry, which accounts for the many films from the
silent era onward that turn back on themselves, displaying a fascination with
the process of character creation, plot movement, motion picture storytelling
itself, resulting in a number of movies about making movies.
Although the writer, director, and producer of Stranger
than Fiction cite a great many sources, from Pirandello to Homer
Simpson, and employ the usual trendy, facile references to post modernism, the
notion of a highly self-conscious work that demonstrates an awareness of its
own artifice dates back several decades and includes not only film but prose
fiction and even comic strips. Their purported experimentation with style and
content in fact more closely resembles M. Night Shyamalan’s
summer flop, Lady in the Water, than Six Characters in Search of an Author.
In Stranger than
Fiction Will Ferrell plays Harold Crick (many of the names refer archly to
famous scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers), an auditor for the IRS, a
predictably dull man in a hated profession who leads a
crushingly humdrum life. At an early point in the movie Harold hears its female
narrator commenting on his behavior, which understandably puzzles and, when the
voice mentions his death, distresses him; he consults a psychiatrist, who sends
him to a literary theorist, Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman). Hilbert
determines that Harold’s life follows the plot of a novel-in-progress, the work
of Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), and the two of them must figure out if the
book (and Harold’s life) will end as tragedy or comedy.
In part because of his discovery of his function in the
novel, Harold breaks out of the deep rut of his daily routine and falls in love
with Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a baker whose
tax returns he is auditing. While their relationship could possibly turn the
story into comedy, Karen Eiffel’s search for a way to kill off her protagonist
threatens to make it a tragedy. In their several meetings, Hilbert analyzes the
accumulating incidents in Harold’s life, mentioning a number of other
experimental writers, including Italo Calvino, and
eventually convinces him to cooperate with the narrative voice and allow the
story to unfold until it reaches its proper end.
Within and beside the story of Harold’s life and his efforts
to withstand the control of his “author,” a couple of other, initially
unrelated characters occasionally appear; caught in the machinations of the
plot, they will show up together at the film’s climax. Their presence
underlines the artificiality of the narrative and the manipulations that cause
the climactic events. They also serve to reaffirm the tenuousness of the
distinction between tragedy and comedy, the sense that either form could result
from the same concatenation of incidents and people.
Stranger than Fiction‘s
self conscious combination of shallow cleverness and cute whimsy grows
increasingly tiresome as the story develops and repeats itself over and over.
The characters participate in no recognizable reality, which makes the novel
that they in effect dwell in seem abstract and academic, the sort of fiction
the writer enjoys more than the reader, the kind of work ground out in a
thousand creative writing courses. The general lifelessness extends to the two
lovers, a drab, uninteresting, and unattractive couple without so much as a
gram of chemistry between them.
Whether intentionally or not, Will Ferrell
seems as colorless as his character, utterly unconvincing as human being and as
a fictional character. The cardboard characterization even extends to so
accomplished an actor as Emma Thompson, who can only
repeat the same gestures, the same grimaces, and apparently wear the same
clothing throughout the picture. Dustin Hoffman manages to imbue his character,
a most unbelievable professor, with at least a measure of droll and offhand
pedantry, just about the only engaging element in Stranger than Fiction.
Stranger than Fiction (PG-13), directed by Marc Forster, is now
playing at Culver Ridge, Pittsford, Henrietta, Webster, Tinseltown, Greece Ridge, and Eastview.
This article appears in Nov 15-21, 2006.
