Movie: Stranger Than Fiction

The word that comes to mind to describe this movie: charming. Absolutely charming.

Will Farrell is excellent as Harold Crick, a boring numbers-obsessed IRS auditor who wakes up one morning to find his life being narrated in his head. And when the narrator announces that he is facing an imminent death, he decides it’s time to change his life.

I consider this to be a dramatic role in a quirky dramatic film. There are lots of elements of comedy in this movie, but I think Will Farrell’s performance is SO great and SO honest that for me it played as a drama and within 10-15 minutes I stopped looking for slapstick. Other comedic actors have successfully made the movie to drama – Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, Adam Sandler (while I thought “Punch Drunk Love” sucked overall, Sandler was quite good in it), to name a few. Add Will Farrell to that list.

Farrell’s costars were plentiful in this movie. Emma Thompson (as the neurotic narrator/author), Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, Linda Hunt, and Tom Hulce (wow he let himself go, didn’t he?). The other great co-star was the GUI special effects that show what Harold’s obsession with numbers looks like. Too many times this type of gimick is used only briefly and then thrown away as the story gets going. See “Brigit Jones’ Diary” when her diary entries appear on the screen during the first few scenes and then don’t show up again at all through the rest of the movie. See “Fight Club” when Edward Norton’s apartment is laid out like an Ikea catalog in a weird sequence that doesn’t make sense with the rest of the movie. Then see “Stranger Than Fiction” where this special effect is used perfectly throughout the entire film as opposed to being a “wasn’t that one thing cool?” moment in one scene. Absolutely brilliant – after all, just because Harold decides to change his life doesn’t mean his obsession with numbers stops. And I loved that the director kept up that visual cue in this movie.

This is an extremely well-written movie, given the unusual plotline. I cared about each and every character – which is rare for a Hollywood movie nowadays.

This is one of my favorites in a long time. I’ll be purchasing this one in the future.

4 1/2 homemade cookies out of five.