Stranger Than Fiction Review

November 10, 2006 10:57 AM
by [email]

Since Zach Helm is already being called the new Charlie Kaufman, expectations for "Stranger than Fiction" are relatively set in stone: inventive with a twinge of crazy; lovably bizarre characters; intelligence from the first reel to the last.

"Fiction," which serves as Helm's screenwriting debut and attracted a cast including Emma Thompson, Dustin Hoffman, and Will Farrell, is all of the above and more, satisfying both classic movie conventions (i.e. romance) and Kaufman-esque cravings for the zany.

Farrell stars as Harold Krick, an IRS agent with a life run his life by his wristwatch. Redundancy ends when he wakes up one morning and hears a voice narrating the way he brushes his teeth and catches the bus. The voice is female, British, and merely a nuisance until it predicts his "imminent" death.

After enlisting in the unhelpful help of a stream of psychiatrists, Harold ends up in the office of a literature prof/pool life guard (Hoffman) with a serious caffeine addiction and a ludicrous idea: if Harold wants to find his "narrator" he needs to figure out if the story is a comedy or tragedy.

The reluctant "tax man" is then led to a baker (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who doesn't want to pay her taxes, and smitten even before she feeds him cookies. While he falls in love, Kay Eiffel (Thompson), a prolific novelist with writer's block, tries to figure out a way to kill him.

It's probably unnecessary to talk about the virtues of the cast - director Marc Forster ("Finding Neverland") has lucked out with the best in the business - but here goes. Thomson plays the novelist as a neurotic with a bashed ego, and by the third act we're as involved in her story as we are in Harold's. Hoffman etches a fine line between a caricature and a true original, and the consistently fantastic Gyllenhaal, stuck in the requisite role of the love interest, is as complex as the front liners - a testament both to her work and Helm's smart, sharp dialogue.

And to Forster's deft direction. "Stranger Than Fiction" is such a delicate blend of black comedy, slapstick, and serious themes that one misstep could make a swell soufflé turn to mush. Forster deftly strikes that balances - even though I did keep wondering why Kay Eiffel couldn't just change Harold's name.

Grade: A
By Jenny Halper