Dylan's Movie Review: Ferrell Gets Serious in "Stranger Than Fiction"

The moment that Maggie Gyllenhaal started enticingly describing different types of succulent cookies was the moment that I first fell in love with "Stranger Than Fiction." Not only was a beautiful woman acting like a beautiful person, something that always makes me smile, but also the main character of the movie, INS auditor Harold Crick, was forced to grow as a person.

"Stranger Than Fiction" is, in essence, a movie about personal growth. In the opening scene, we find that Harold, played by Will Ferrell in a surprisingly mellow role, is a slave to numbers and routine. He lacks initiative, and finds his greatest enjoyment in the wave-like sounds that manilla folders make as they rub together. The mission of the various people and plot devices of the film is to force him to break these daily cycles and habits.

The major motivation for Harold's astounding turn-around is the narrative voice that he begins to hear as he brushes his teeth. The voice first disrupts his routines by it's inherent strangeness and later begins to actively change his thoughts by forcing him to concentrate on new thought patterns. Unfortunately for Harold, the voice doesn't stop at this. One day, as he is waiting for the bus, he hears, "Little did he know that this simple, seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death."

It is at this point that we meet the narrator, novelist Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson). Neurotic, obsessed with death, and a compulsive smoker, Eiffel is a nervous wreck due to an extended period of writer's block. She can't figure out how to kill Harold Crick, the necessary ending to her novel, so she spends her days imagining death by falling, car accident and gun shot, all in the midst of massive numbers of cigarettes.

Distraught from the news of his death, Crick seeks the advice of Jules Hilbert, professor of English at the University of Illinois – Chicago (Dustin Hoffman). Together, they begin to work through the list of possible storylines and narrators, first deciding that Harold is in a tragedy then in a comedy and back and forth. Eventually, they decide that Harold must live his life the way he's always wanted.

This results in a budding romance with Ana Pascal (Gyllenhaal), the attractive socialist baker that he must audit, a new-found interest in the guitar, and the absolute destruction of Crick's old habits. Harold is at his height in every way, when he suddenly finds out that his narrator is Ms. Eiffel, a woman with fatal intentions.

By this point, we've fallen in love with the major characters. Each has become attractive in their faults; we've watched them be or become who they are. And as the tragic novel that has been erected marches forward to it's inevitable, yet beautiful, conclusion, we can't help feeling that perhaps, as Hilbert argues, Crick's death is truly inevitable and worthy.

This possibility dominates the final moments of the movie, and it is this conflict of Ms. Eiffel's that imparts significance on the film. Of course, as any movie starring Mr. Fwerrell, the film is incredibly funny, though it relies on deadpan delivery and awkward moments rather than the expected overacting. "Stranger Than Fiction," with it's combination of humor and poignancy, is definitely one of the stronger movies brought to EMU in the recent past.