Movie Info

Stranger Than Fiction

Harold Crick isn't ready to go. Period.

I didn't know about Stranger Than Fiction until I saw a trailer for it. The concept was interesting enough that I really wanted to watch it in theatres. I was fortunate to have watched the full trailer that portrayed the movie as more of a dark comedy, which is very different from Will Farrell's other comedies.

Will Farrell plays Harold Crick, an IRS agent who leads a fairly mundane life. One day, Harold starts to hear a narrative voice. Not a voice in his head, but a voice all around narrating his life. This voice is the voice of Kay Eiffel, a brilliantly depressed writer who writes novels where the main character always dies. Eiffel is suffering from writer's block and doesn't know how to kill Harold Crick. Harold, hearing his foreshadowed death, desperately tries to prevent it by enlisting the aid of Professor Jules Hilbert, played by Dustin Hoffman.

Will Farrell is fantastic in this film. He breaks out of his usual mold of slap-stick humour and delivers a performance that's worthy of some sort of award. I really think that Farrell gave Harold Crick a deep personality. Here's a mundane guy with no future, family and very little friends. Harold is an absurdly smart man but he lacks the social skills that so many nerds and geeks lack. The scenes with Harold and Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal) really showed how fragile Harold could be.

I enjoyed watching Emma Thompson play the alcoholic, chain-smoking, depressed writer. There are a few scenes in the movie where Thompson really gets to shine. The same could be said of Dustin Hoffman. He seemed to have taken his Mr. Focker role from Meet the Fockers and added the professor of literature to it. I loved the little subtle things he did, from reheating the coffee to not wearing shoes or socks. Really funny stuff.

Marc Forster (Monster Ball, Finding Neverland) directs Stranger Than Fiction. He does a good job with the flow of the movie. Although some events were confusing in the beginning, everything really did fall into place towards the end of the movie. It's funny because at one point, Harold knew what the audience knew since it was being narrated to him. Then at the end, Harold knew more than the audience. I loved how suddenly the audience was left in suspense. Little did the audience know...

This movie is about change. Change for Harold Crick, change Kay Eiffel, change for almost every character in the movie, and perhaps change even for the audience?. The ending is interesting and I thought it really suited the mood of the overall movie. After all, Kay Eiffel writes tragedies right?

If you want to see a different side of Will Farrell, definitely go see this movie. I'm definitely building respect for Farrell's acting ability. I didn't really think he was that great in Saturday Night Live and considered him another SNL comedian that made movies that had the same formula. Farrell seems to want to break his type-casting and I hope he takes more serious roles in the future as well.

Dragoncrypt Sunday, November 19, 2006