Stranger Than Fiction

Attention, moviegoers! Stranger than Fiction has an announcement to make: It is a smart movie with literary references in which funnyman Will Ferrell shows his depth, in case you missed it in Melinda and Melinda. Anyway, much as it strives to be an intelligent story about intelligent people, Stranger is basically Adaptation for Dummies.

Characters here are defined by their quirks. Maggie Gyllenhaal simpers as a sexy, tattooed baker...who dropped out of Harvard Law School! Dustin Hoffman flaps his jaws as a brainy professor...who walks around his office barefoot! Emma Thompson goes for woe as eccentric novelist Kay Eiffel…who chain-smokes and puts out her butts in wads of Kleenex! All the players come together around Will Ferrell, who plays Harold Crick, an IRS agent...with a heart!

Crick, rigid and anal like the 40-Year-Old Virgin minus the action figures, has never known love or eaten a homemade chocolate chip cookie. Seriously. He hasn’t. And he’s going to, now that he has learned Eiffel is writing his life, planning to kill him off.

The concept is highbrow, indeed. But a concept is nothing without momentum. We never get the raw energy that a man is trying to save his life. Don’t blame Ferrell, blame the filmmakers. We’re never convinced that Harold might die, so we don’t really care that he’s trying so damn hard to live. First-time screenwriter Zach Helm has a good ear for dialogue—Ferrell’s scenes with Hoffman are particularly zingy—but all the talking would be more digestible in an off-Broadway playhouse.

After a series of stagy conversations that feel ripped from the pages of Screenwriting 101—hero seeks counsel from various oddballs and decides that he is not crazy, hero resolves to find out of his life is a comedy or a tragedy—Harold meets the sexy baker with Ivy League street cred. And that’s when the yawns really begin. Ferrell, a chemistry wiz, doesn’t jive with Gyllenhaal, who delivers her lines with all the overwrought daintiness of a snotty pastry chef doling out dollops of high-end whipped cream. Particularly annoying is the scene in which she breaks through to Harold by cajoling him to “eat...a...cookie.” Yawn. When Harold finally tosses his guitar aside and mounts the kooky baker, I actually started laughing.

Stranger works best when it’s about the author. Thompson is compelling as ever, and it’s cathartic to watch her struggle with her inner demons. Too bad we don’t get to learn where they come from, because at the end of the day she’s far more engaging than her quirky characters.