The latest Will Ferrell vehicle offers two hours of dry and witty meta-fiction. Stranger Than Fiction is smart, it's cleanly crafted and it's got a feel-good love story, but frankly, it's also kind of boring.
The film follows the number-obsessed corporate automaton Harold Crick (Will Ferrell). Harold's rigidly scheduled and monotonous life is thrown for a loop one morning when a disembodied British voice that only he can hear begins narrating over his actions. As Harold says, the voice narrates his own life "accurately and with a better vocabulary" than he does. Trying to make sense of it all, Harold begins meeting with a literary theorist Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) to determine the nature of the story within which he has been placed.
The real plot arc kicks in when the voice tells Harold events have been set into motion that will inevitably lead to his death. In the hopes of saving his life, Harold rebels against the narration, desperately searching for a way to stop the impending morbid end of his story.
What Harold doesn't know is that the voice's source is actually Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), a misanthropic and somewhat suicidal novelist with writer's block. Harold's life is prolonged only by the fact Eiffel can't think of the right way for him to die.
On top of all this, Harold meets a cute Harvard Law dropout turned baker, Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal), that he's supposed to be auditing for tax evasion -- oh yeah, Harold's an IRS agent. She's the ultra-liberal, uninhibited antithesis of everything Harold stands for, but opposites attract and an unlikely love story kicks in between the two which forces Harold to re-examine his detached outlook on life.
It's all quite clever. The combination of the standardized love story, Eiffel's writing struggles and Harold's illuminating meetings with Hilbert on narrative theory forces the viewer to confront the constructed nature of storytelling. At the same time, the humanistic tone of the film's own narrative keeps the meta-drama grounded in a light and life-affirming base.
Unfortunately Stranger often gets bemired in a tedious exploration of the more obvious tropes its high concept offers. Ferrell's character is such a robotic everyman that, at the risk of sounding like a know-it-all, it becomes too easy to see where the film is going. The "living your life to the fullest" versus "just living" opposition set up by Harold and Ana's relationship is presented heavy-handedly. As things unfold, Harold comes out of his shell with a clockwork-like predictability that isn't all that fun to watch. The film lacks personality. It's nice to see Ferrell cast outside his usual over-the-top shtick, and he doesn't make all that bad a straight man, but Stranger doesn't supplant Ferrell's customary wild antics with anything more deserving. I can only stomach so many shots of Ferrell staring into mirror contemplating his own existence before the postmodernist appeal of it all wears off. Supporting characters don't pick up the slack either -- particularly Thompson's novelist, who is unlikable and eccentric in a way that manages to feel completely unexceptional.
I feel kind of guilty ripping on a comedy that tries so earnestly to do something fresh and unique. Perhaps my biggest problem is that Stranger comes painfully close to being genuinely brilliant. The presentation here just isn't gutsy enough. Stranger is all about playing with convention, but the ponderous path the film plods around its various heady themes ends up feeling completely conventional itself. While Stranger Than Fiction's suspense is built off the old will-he-die-or-wont-he conceit, by the end of it all, I really didn't care what happened to Harold Crick.
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