12A, 113 mins
Stranger than Fiction is a promising title. The hero is Will Ferrell, a highly paid Hollywood comedian here playing a tax inspector. The director is Marc Forster, the gloomy engineer of award-winning hits such as Finding Neverland and Monster’s Ball. The writer is Zach Helm, a total unknown who was presumably scraped off the front bumper of a speed boat. Their joint quest is to turn an old literary trick into cinema magic. The kind of magic that will transform Ferrell into a serious actor, flatter Forster with a sense of humour, and perhaps earn Helm a more useful job description.
Their dreams are doomed. Ferrell is quite hopeless as Romeo. Forster employs the most depressing crank in Hollywood (Dustin Hoffman, naturally) as his comic therapist. And Helm’s script is not only stranger than fiction, it’s utterly preposterous. There are no wild leaps of imagination. Just gaping holes.
Ferrell is Harold Crick, a time-serving drone who works for America’s Internal Revenue Service. He is good with numbers and hopeless at life. He is also the fictional hero of Emma Thompson’s latest novel. She is a celebrated author who has spent ten years writing a masterpiece about this loser without the slightest idea that he might actually exist. Her crisp voice-over stalks Crick’s morning routine: “His wrist watch thought the Windsor knot made his neck look fat, but said nothing.”
Deep. The publishers are so eager to print this Booker prize-winning prose that they assign an 18-stone editorial assistant in a pin-stripe suit (Queen Latifah) to metaphorically beat it out of her. For a lucid moment the film offers the tempting possibility that Thompson is actually insane. She wears stripy pyjamas, and her chic white flat is entirely empty apart from a telephone, a typewriter and a desk. Perhaps the film is set in a lunatic asylum? The mad plot begs to differ.
The existential drama begins when Ferrell stares into his shaving mirror and hears Thompson’s voice in his head as she taps out the final pages of her book. Admittedly there’s something faintly amusing about discovering that your entire life is someone else’s bad fiction.
But Ferrell has no time to crunch such thoughts. Thompson has a famous habit of slaughtering her protagonist in the final chapter, and life is suddenly far more intense when you’re three paragraphs short of losing it. There’s sex to squeeze in, for starters. I’m quite happy to suspend disbelief, but why Maggie Gyllenhaal’s slinky chef should fall for an anal robot such as Crick is frankly beyond the scope of the most Grimm fairytale.
The panicky accountant duly turns to Hoffman’s literary theorist for last-minute answers. True to his Method roots, Hoffman takes his socks and shoes off. He argues that not only is it useless to struggle against destiny, but it would ruin a damn fine book. Then he waggles and inspects his toes.
This kind of divine comedy is simply banal. The irritating tic about Forster’s film is that it keeps reminding you of more interesting fights between manipulative gods and their victims: The Truman Show, Adaptation and Being John Malkovich. This film is ultimately not strange enough.
JAMES CHRISTOPHER