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Stranger Than Fiction November 19, 2006 |
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Harold Crick, whether you like “Stranger Than Fiction” or not, or the atypical performance Will Ferrell gives as the character, you’ve got to love that name, not only because it sounds so, shall we say, made up, but because in a movie as conventionally oddball as this, only a perfectly wonkish name like Harold Crick would do. It just rolls off the tongue, and when said in narration by Emma Thompson, narrating the life of an IRS agent while conversely writing the same narrative as her own novel, it’s the kind of name that lends itself to literate fiction, like Atticus Finch or Huckleberry Finn, names at once instantly recognizable as much for their uniqueness as for the attributes of the characters themselves. In “Stranger Then Fiction”, the new film by director Marc Forster, written by newcomer Zach Helm with a few nods to the surrealist stylings of Charlie Kaufman, Harold Crick is a patsy, a low level rank and file auditor for the IRS who lives a non-existence in a drab New York apartment with little flare and little care for advancement; a character ripe for the kind of screwball awakening that can only happen when worlds collide, and an omnipresent female voice starts narrating your every move with perfectly formed sentences that sound all the more prescient when preceding a name as funny and cleverly taciturn as that of Harold Crick. All apologies to the Bob Smith’s and Lee Jones’s of the world, but ordinary names don’t work well with slightly dark surrealist comedy like this, and having Emma Thompson’s frustrated, burned out author toss about the name in anguish as she plots his demise (“I don’t know how to kill Harold Crick”), just works so much better than it would with Dave Thompson or Joe Collins. Not that a name makes a movie, of course, but sometimes just a name is enough to propel a screenplay, especially one in which the first name is almost always connected in sentence with the last name, from cleverly plotted gimmick, where a schmo hears a voice and decides to suddenly live his life more flamboyantly because the voice plans an assassination, to metaphysical work of written art. The jury is still out on whether Helm’s script is indeed as important as it appears to be, but one thing is for sure, in Harold Crick he’s got himself the best character name of the year, and one that, quite literally, makes the film that much better for having it. But enough about a name, Forster’s film is more than one character’s funny, memorable name, in fact, it’s a lot more than just a name, it’s a highly stylized romantic comedy in which seemingly supernatural things, namely, a disembodied female voice, propels the lives of various New Yorkers towards fates they little saw coming. One day while brushing his teeth Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) begins to hear a narrator describing his every move, an off-putting phenomenon that only starts showing promise when it tells him how to feel, and respond, to the pretty baker (Maggie Gyllenhaal) he’s currently auditing, but turns troublesome when it so casually mentions “little did he know”, a common phrase a local lit professor (Dustin Hoffman) claims means an imminent death. Meanwhile, across town somewhere, Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) is laboring to finish her latest work of fiction, a novel about one Harold Crick and his pathetic existence as a lonely perfectionist in a New York filled with lonely, pathetic perfectionists, but she can’t find the perfect ending, how to off her leading man. Naturally this is all very stressful for both Harold, who thinks he might be going crazy, and Karen, who is suffering from a 10-year long case of serious writer’s block, but the film finds ways to play that stress into a mixture of sweetness and surrealism through comedy and character soul searching, especially when Harold falls in love with the free-spirited baker, and Karen begins to have conflicting feelings about killing off a character who has experienced such significant personal growth. The story may strain a bit resolving itself towards the end (how do you plausibly and realistically explain something only suitable to science-fiction?), and fans of Ferrell’s usually spastic/ironic brand of humor may be thrown for a loop with this mature, somewhat downbeat turn as a newly reformed drip (think also Adam Sandler in “Punch Drunk Love”), but it’s endlessly clever, well directed by Forster, who is becoming one of our most consistently reliable directors, and gifted with a great cast of actors like Hoffman, Gyllenhaal, and Thompson who bring credibility and professionalism to everything they do. Harold Crick the name may outlive Harold Crick the character in the long run, but for now, both fit fine into “Stranger Than Fiction”, which itself fits somewhere between “Adaptation”, Camus, and “Groundhog Day”. “Stranger Than Fiction” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59. by Adam Suraf
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